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SAKURAMBO 



By 

JAMES S. DE BENNEVILLE 



"Oh, past delights, 
Whereof the very thought excites 
A thrill in every limb, as though 
The merry life of long ago 
I lived again." 

Romance of the Rose 



(All rights resiirved) 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoplM fllceiVMl 

SEP 25 1906 

n •♦tyfifM Entry 

CLASS /\ XXc.Nt. 
COPY ■. 






Copyright, 11^06 
By JAMES S. de BENNEVILLE 



Press of J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



PREFACE 

In travelling through the highways and byways of a country 
there are many questions which present themselves, and which we 
try to answer on the facts familiar to us of our own present and 
.past, require a resume of the authorities to which recourse was had 
so numerously sprinkled over the land of Japan, naturally these 
questions come up, to which, with this secretive Oriental people, it 
is difficult to find an answer. The material of this book is largely 
made of personal impressions gained by four years of travel 
through its countryside. For the opinions here expressed, only 
the writer is responsible. The facts, dealing in some cases with the 
past, require a resume of the authorities to which recourse was had: 
to obtain such facts. 

I would therefore mention, in connection with Chapter IV., 
Klaproth's translation of the O Dai IcJiirau, a Japanese dry-as-dust 
chronicle compiled about the middle of the seventeenth century, and 
carried down to 1818 by Klaproth himself; "Land Tenure and 
Local Institutions in Old Japan," by Simmons and VVigmore, and 
" Private Law in Old Japan," by Wigmore, especially his intro- 
duction. The first-mentioned is published in the Transactions of the 
Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. XIX., Part I. ; the second, in Vol. 
XX., the Supplements. Also, mention should be made of Dr. 
Knox's translation of the Hyd-chu-ori of Arai Hakuseki (Vol. 
XXX., Part II., of the Transactions) ; also of Professor Dropper's 
"Population of the Tokugawa Period" (Vol. XX., Part II., of 
the Transactions). As to Chapter VI.. I would refer to " Ances- 
tor Worship and Japanese Law," by Professor Nubushigi Hozumi, 
and to Mr. J. H. Gubbin's introduction to and translation of the 
civil code dealing with the Family in Japan ; also to Professor Pas- 
quale Villari's chapters on the Feudal System in Italy and Rise of 
the Communes, in his " History of Florence ; " also^ to the " Institu- 
tions Politiques du Japon," by Theophile Collier. As to Chapter 



PREFACE 

VII., Mr. A. G. Lay's paper on " Political Parties in Japan " was 
consulted (Transactions, Vol. XXX., Part III.), as also authorities 
more specifically referred to in the text. As to Chapter VIII., in 
addition to the foot-note placed at the beginning of the chapter, 
I would add Mr. L. H. Parker's " Race Struggles in Korea " 
(Transactions, Vol. XVIIL, Part II.), and Mr. W. G. Aston's 
" Early History of Japan " (Transactions, Vol. XVI.). 

The foreign newspapers published in Japan are also a valuable 
source of material. These contain the impressions and experiences 
of men resident for many years in the country. Many special 
articles are so contributed, especially to the Japan Times (published 
by Japanese, in English) and the Japan Daily Mail, the latter of 
which has a monthly summary of the religious and native press, 
covering the widest range of subjects. Histories of Japan are 
numerous. That of Murdoch and Yamagata is a philosophical 
discussion based on the original documents of the period from the 
times of Nobunaga to the death of lyeyasu. Of those covering the 
whole period of Japanese history from legendary to modern times, 
mention should be made of Murray's " History," in the Story of 
Nations series, and " The Mikado's Empire," by Doctor Griffis. 

In dealing with so many subjects covering a wide field there 
is ample room for an equally wide divergence of opinion. In the 
laws of Shotoku Taishi it is said : " Be not angered with others on 
account of disagreement of opinion. Each one may have a dif- 
ferent point of view, and may therefore come to a different con- 
clusion." All that can be asked is sincerity, and this is claimed 
for the present volume. And one word as to the title. The 
cherry-blossom, as is known, is distinctly the national flower of 
Japan. The tree is cultivated with reference to the beautiful spring 
bloom, when for a few days the groves are a sight of exquisite 
beauty. Sakura is the term usually applied to the tree itself, as we 
say '' the cherry " meaning the cherry-tree. It enters into many 
combinations : Sakurabana, the cherry-blossom ; sakuraka, the 
delicate odour of the blossom ; sakiiragari, the excursions to see the 
blossoms ; and so we pass on to the fruit of the tree — Sakuramho. 

Omarudani, August 7, 1905. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I.— FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN .... 1 

II.— BOSHU WAY . . . . '. . .33 

III.— IWASHIRO WAY. . . . . . .70 

IV.— THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE . . .106 

v.— THROUGH KOTSUKE 151 

VI.— SHINANO WAY 185 

VII.— FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 228 

VIII.— THE LAND OF YAMATO 268 

IX.— NUNC DIMITTIS 307 



SAKURAMBO 

I 

FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 

" We went on board, and having set sail, came near the coast of 
Lanternland. We then saw certain little hovering fires on the 
sea." — Rabelais. 

It was one of the trifling incidents of life that led me to pitch 
my tent among this strange people. A sea tossed by the fresh breeze 
into a mass of whitecaps, a cloudless summer day monotonous 
in its sameness to the similar days that had preceded and would 
follow it, the desire for variety even if only in the weather, and a 
Japanese ricksha formed the compound of elements required to 
stiffen up the vacillating ego to say " I shall." There were also 
the two essential stimulants to such an assertion of energy : the 
direct object acting as reagent and the ultimate object to be sought 
as result. The direct object was the sea itself. There is some- 
thing about the presence of large bodies of water inciting man to 
get on them or in them. There is no race so savage or so self- 
supporting in its present habitat that it has not been tempted beyond 
its own shores to seek the unknown. Moreover the Pacific, broad 
and wide-expanding as it is, does not seem such a lonely ocean as 
the others. There is always an island lying around loose some- 
where to bump into, like icebergs in season in the North Atlantic, 
and although men go down to the sea in ships on the Pacific and 
never return, there are romances of sunny isles, brown-skinned 
maidens, cocoanut palms and giant decapods, to stimulate curi- 
osity and to offset the lugubrious side of the oceanic ennui. And 
who does not believe himself the immortal, the one favoured by 
Fate and free from her disasters ? 

The little " man-power wagon," like a vane, pointed the direc- 

I 



2 SAKURAMBO 

tion of the prevailing sentiment. In its very name it seemed so 
isolated from the land of machinery, where man-power had been 
relegated to the past, where man had been almost relegated to the 
past, and the artisan had become a mere additional lever to the 
complicated machine, a lever of flesh among the levers of iron. To 
live among a people where arms of flesh and blood overcame the 
inertia of weight, where muscle, not steel, triumphed over nature, 
where your human steed whisked you through the country at a 
good round trot, and always found time to look after the personal 
comfort of his freight, and was always ready to enter into conver- 
sation with it on the slightest provocation, whether on matters of 
personal interest or on matters local to the place and occasion ! It 
sometimes seems to me that our boasted equality of man in the 
West is a very fictitious feeling. Few are the prophets to preach 
the dignity of manual labour, and we undeniably look down on 
occupations that imply nothing but the straining of the muscles, 
so much '* horse-power " as we call it, and of less value than steam 
and electricity, because the latter is more economically distributed. 
Although the lower will alwa5^s unite in dislike and jealousy against 
the higher, there is a greater feeling of disdain of manual labour 
shown in the man who adds so many yards of figures, or measures 
so many 5^ards of cloth, than in the man with miles of railway on 
his back, and his honour and reputation upholding the interests 
of thousands of lives depending on his brain and judgment for 
their daily bread. Our ricksha runner or kurumaya has no feeling 
in his soul that his employer despises him for his daily toil. One 
man is born to silk and another to cotton. One man is a shop- 
keeper, another gets his living from a bank, and another from the 
rice-fields. He may envy the, to his eye, easier toil of the other 
man, but not its nature. He may envy the better education and 
training that has enabled the other man to obtain his higher posi- 
tion, but he does not for that reason despise his own means of 
living. And how greatly that higher knowledge and training is 
valued in Japan ! Hundreds of young men and boys will leave bet- 
ter occupations, in a social sense, to take up so-called menial but bet- 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 3 

ter paid positions, which give them the money to gain training and 
knowledge; who go out as cooks, " boys " or servants, gardeners, 
banfo or under-clerks in the service of foreigners, a course a 
thousandfold more disliked than service among their own people, 
although the latter affords lower pay, or no pay, simply to acquire 
a foreign language. Never is there displayed in them a contempt 
for their occupation, a sense of degradation in pursuing it, simply 
because a feeling of humiliation due to menial service does not 
exist. The end justifies the means and honours the form of toil. 
Although service in foreign countries opens their eyes as to the 
foreign view-point of menial labour, I doubt if there are any, or 
but few, conversions to western ideas in this respect. No people 
hold knowledge, education, and all it brings, in higher honour 
than the Japanese, but all labour has its honourable side. 

I remember once, in travelling, meeting a peculiarly attractive 
character in one of ' our numerous self-made men. He was a 
Yankee who had made a fortune in the West, and had returned to 
his old home in New England to enjoy the balance of life. His 
interests in the West took him there frequently, and they were his- 
mission on the occasion on which I met him. He was not only 
a bright man, but well informed by reading, had travelled over all 
the United States and Mexico on business, and on most subjects 
was extremely liberal in his views. Except as to the Oriental. 
On that point his brains seemed to be fairly " cut bias," so to speak. 
To him the Oriental was the opium-smoking, degraded Canton 
coolie. There was no other. The idea that there were men in 
the East fit opponents for our learned divines, economists, and 
statesmen ; that there were thousands of wealthy merchants doing 
business on a scale as large as our own, and that these men required 
for their business a capital, not only of money but of education 
and world-wide experience, quite as great as with ourselves ; that 
below them were artisans quite as skilful, and gaining a living to 
their own content, and that it was the surplus, the unskilful, of this 
class that sought other countries — these were Munchausen tales. 
He told me how on a recent occasion he had met in travelling a 



4 SAKURAMBO 

Chinaman. Actually, the audacious heathen travelled in a Pull- 
man, whereas he, the peer of kings, travelled in the common car. 
Moreover, the said heathen paid not the least attention to his 
fellow-travellers, generally minded his own business, had no sense 
of his own shortcomings as one of those yellow-skinned races so 
recently described in the school geographies as " semi-civilized," 
or of his audacity in regarding himself as the equal of the other 
kings (travelling Pullman), and in general behaved himself, 
according to my now excited friend, like .the Chinese gentleman 
that he was. Now the fact flashed across me, that such gross 
ignorance was not confined to my Yankee friend. He really be- 
lieved every word he said, and could have cited articles by the 
hundred and editorials by the score, from the daily papers, sup- 
porting just what he said. And there came to mind the almost 
universal tone of superiority that we take toward these eastern 
nations. We will not force a tariff on any European country, or 
they on us, because we lack the power to do so ; we will submit our 
citizens to their laws, and they reciprocate, because we must submit 
or go away; we exclude from our shores whoever and whatever 
we please, and it is our right to do so : but we force on eastern 
nations our goods on terms to suit ourselves, and without regard 
to the distress and disorganization it may cause in their affairs; 
we force ourselves jon them on terms making us practically irre- 
sponsible to any authority among them ; we murder one Chinaman, 
or a score of them, and it is the outbreak of a mob, and the Gov- 
ernor of the offending state reports " parties unknown." A China- 
man in a quarrel kills a foreigner, and there is a scramble to deter- 
mine the nationality of the murdered man, for the plunder is well 
worth the hurly-burly. The Governor of the Chinese state is 
promptly called on to execute somebody, which he does — although 
probably the victim is in no way connected with the tragedy, but 
has been marked out for removal on other grounds — and to pay 
an indemnity, which he does far less willingly. Western ideas of 
justice hardly seem to be reached in such cases, however good the 
principle. Lax law and lax justice should be well amerced. The 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 5 

duty, however, seems to be reciprocal. A province and a million 
people is high pay for two priests killed by a mob. To us " John " 
is still " the heathen Chinee," and the rest of us, European and 
American, are the burly ruffians of the Sierras, drawn from all 
quarters of the globe, armed to the teeth, and really a good-natured 
lot — when we are sober and don't hang the wrong man. 

Some such thoughts came into my head as SaburO' pushed back 
the heavy wooden outside shutters into the tohnkuro (alcove), and 
threw wide open the little Japanese house to the whole of out- 
doors. Saburo' is a little dried-up man, over forty years of age, 
and hence toshiyori (an old man) to the reverent younger gen- 
eration ; a smooth face, the top of his head bereft of hair, the red 
of hard winter apples in his sallow face, and yet a plumpness 
therein that gives him the delusive appearance of " childlike and 
bland." Saburo's countrymen had been wise in their generation. 
Martial valour is generally an inherent quality in island races, and 
a rigid caste system together with a punctilious code of etiquette 
had fostered and kept alive the martial spirit. The government 
had crushed out public disturbance in the land, and encouraged 
and substituted therefor private war. It is a matter of history how 
the martial spirit was there in 1853 and the years closely follow- 
ing, but the means and the skill to make use of it were lacking. 
The Japanese were dispersed like a band of rioters before the 
modern armed and drilled sailors and marines from the foreign 
warships. Before weapons of precision and modern tactics they 
were helpless. What they lacked was the spirit of the times. For 
two hundred and fifty years they had remained in the sixteenth 
century in thought and in practice, but the developed mind was 
there. We hear expressions of wonder as to the progress made 
by the Japanese within the last fifty years. Just why, it is hard 
to see. In the case of a race of savages such as the New Zealand 
Maori, one can indeed wonder at seeing the ripest product of civil- 
ization in men whose professional attainments in law, medicine, or 
politics, stand without question, and whose grandfathers were active 
advocates of " benevolent assimilation " of their fellow-men by the 



6 SAKURAMBO 

fundamental medium of the soup-pot. In the present case we are 
deahng with a change of material direction of a high civilization. 
Is there any intrinsic mental development in the man who rides at 
one hundred miles an hour on the third-rail system and the man 
who eighty years ago rode at twelve miles an hour in a coach? 
It seems to me that if Csesar or Norman William returned to the 
scenes of their former activity, we would find that it would not 
take them hundreds of years to grasp the science of modern war. 
Given supreme power, Caesar could have written the Gallic wars 
at any time in history, and at the end of the eighteenth century 
and early in the nineteenth century he did so write them. This 
country of Japan had learnt its lesson well, and as I looked across 
the little garden to Tokyo Bay and the Nokogiriyama in Boshu, the 
line of forts lying across the bay filled the middle ground, and the 
naval station of Yokosuka lay nestled in the line of blue hills 
separating this shut-in basin from the Sagami Bay, open to the 
beat and storms of the ocean. Strong are the forts and elaborate 
the precautions taken in this corner of the Island Empire, for here 
lies the entrance to its capital and its rich Tokyo plain, extending 
for miles to the north in a champaign country comparatively 
extensive for Japan, one of the few vulnerable points of the 
Empire. 

The scene is anything but warlike, this fine January morning, 
although the land is in the throes of a great war. Japan is a 
country in which pretty scenery, charming combinations of sea 
and hill without savage grandeur, is so widely distributed that a 
man must indeed live in the bottom of a well to get away from 
beauty of some kind. This Sagami arm is the beauty-spot of 
Tokyo Bay, the prettiest view of it being perhaps from above 
Kanazawa, looking south. From the heights above the fishing 
village of Negishi there is a charming picture of an indented jumble 
of hills and sea, which in summer is rendered still more beautiful 
by the contrast between the vivid green of the growing rice and the 
darker green of the pines and fir-trees. The Japanese pine 
(dinatsu) fits in peculiarly to the style of the scenery. Nature 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 7 

seems to have an aesthetic sense of propriety in throwing together 
her materials. It is a grotesque, an obsession. Anywhere else it 
would be absolutely condemned as a tree. Slender, stumpy, 
knarled, distorted, it seems possessed of a vegetable locomotor 
ataxia. A western gardener, seeing such a tree in a plantation 
under his care, would root it off the surface of the earth, and con- 
demn it, not to firewood, for it hardly rises to such dignity, but to 
chips and kindling for the fairer specimens of Nature's woodcraft 
and the manor chimney. The Japanese, on the contrary, cherish 
it. They build elaborate structures to prop up its distorted 
branches, grown out of all relation to the trunk, like the arms of 
a polypus. They plaster up its wounds, so that not an ounce of 
precious sap will be lost. They revel in its deviation from Nature's 
norm, and when they have succeeded in bolstering up one of these 
degenerates into a life of ten generations, they build a circle of 
tea-houses around it and flock in crowds to look at it. As to how 
far they are right or wrong is not a matter of importance. The 
great black pines of the Sierras, the beautiful firs and hemlocks 
from Maine to Oregon, attract the eye by the purity of their curves 
and lines, and Nature duly gives them their centuries of life. 
They are strong in their symmetry. Such life, however, as the 
Japanese pine is contra Nature, for such exaggerations of trees, 
by the very laws of mechanics, are condemned as monsters. The 
great disparity between trunk and branches would have killed the 
tree long since, splitting the trunk from top to bottom, and leaving 
it an incoherent tangle on the ground. It is man who has baffled 
Nature, and thwarted her remedial legislation. In January, how- 
ever, it is the prevalence of this pine and the comparative absence 
of deciduous trees that give the landscape its green and living 
appearance. The sign of winter is displayed by the snowy cone of 
Fuji, which, by a sweep of a small segment of the circle, is brought 
into view, and continues along the lofty Oyama range, disappear- 
ing north and northwest into the Tokyo plain. The landscape 
will not materially change for months. The rice is not trans- 
planted until June, and the bare, shining, checkerboard patches, 



8 SAKURAMBO 

fortunately hidden under water, even weeks later will only show 
here and there the velvety green of tiny patches of seed rice. Yet 
winter and late fall are in many respects the best seasons in eastern 
Japan. It is a rainy land at other times. It is safe to say that 
from March to November the days of the month on which rain will 
fall, more or less, will average nine in number, and others will be 
so threatening as to thwart outdoor intentions. In winter, how- 
ever, for days the sun shines, not with the steady persistency of 
southern California, but enough so as to enable man to be fairly 
careless as to his future outside engagements. Unfortunately, it 
is not a season for the foreign visitor. The summer resorts are 
rarely opened before April, and the Japanese houses, lacking any 
heating apparatus, become bitterly cold after the sun goes down. 
To live in a Japanese house in winter requires a concession on the 
part of the foreigners to the native clothing, which is far warmer 
than our western clothing. It is a common sight to see the " boys " 
employed in foreign hotels, and who necessarily wear tights and 
gaiters in European style, huddled around the stove, palpably suf- 
fering from cold. The same " boy " off duty and squatting on the 
tatami in his little home open to the blasts of heaven, wrapped up 
in three or four layers of cotton-wadded kimonos, merely finds it 
necessary, from time to time, to stretch his frozen fingers over 
the few sticks of charcoal in the hibachi (brazier). Granted the 
art of sitting on one's feet, and the native dress, winter days, at 
least, are quite tolerable in a Japanese house from December to 
April. 

Sunrise is the signal for the day's work or play to begin, and 
sunrise is closely followed by Saburo and his operation on the 
shutters, the amado or rain-doors, as they are often called, in dis- 
tinction from the slioji or light wooden frames in which rice-paper 
replaces the glass of our western country, the only means by which 
in daytime the Japanese house is shut off from the gaze of the 
outside world. These to are about the only thing heavy and 
ungraceful in a structure which in other respects is lightness and 
grace itself in its arrangements ; and when a driving rain from 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 9 

the wrong quarter threatens to wash the rice-paper out of the 
frames of the shoji, then even in daytime the to have to be puhed 
out of the httle box-hke frame into which they fit when not in use, 
and we are shut in, in semi-darkness, bodily and mental, until the 
wind changes and gives our neighbours a dose, or the rain ceases, 
or, more often, drops into a gentle drizzle. Although Japan is a 
rainy country, such driving storms are not very prevalent, the 
steady soak, soak, from a dripping sky being more the rule; but 
in typhoon weather, sometimes for several days we will be shut in 
to darkness and ourselves. It must be confessed that under such 
circumstances the Japanese house does not shine ; but on a bright 
day, and in the warm weather, which substantially lasts from May 
until November, when even the shoji can be removed temporarily 
from their grooves and the whole house thrown open to the air, 
then this little platform raised some two or three feet from the 
ground is an ideal home. For platform it really is, enclosed only 
at points where rigidity requires a wall. It has an edging of 
polished wood about three feet wide, always kept in a condition 
of shine like a pair of boots, and on the outer edge of which is 
cut the groove in which slides the to, the tobukiiro being usually 
attached to or sunk in the solid supporting wall section at a corner 
of the structure. On the inner edge of the polished rim a double- 
grooved frame runs around the whole open portion of the house, 
sending off arms at intervals, which cut the flooring into squares of 
size appropriate for rooms. This frame, raised some two inches 
above the flooring, carries the shoji which separate the rooms of 
the house from each other and form the only privacy, limited in 
character, sought in a Japanese house. All is levelled off inside 
the frame by the tatami or Japanese matting, thick, soft, and heavy, 
bringing the whole inside of the house to one level. A little child 
can and does readily carry off the light shoji, and ten minutes will 
convert a large house into one large floor space, only divided 
by the panels crossing the ceiling and which hold the upper end of 
the shoji, and which are often made of fretwork, artificial or 
natural, the latter being often grotesque and always pleasing in 



10 SAKURAMBO 

outline. Such woodwork is highly polished, as also the wooden 
pillars supporting the roof, often left in their original irregularity. 
The tatami is an important item in a Japanese house. Fairly good 
tatami can be obtained for 1.75 yen a mat, every mat being of the 
standard size, 3 by 6 feet, and the house being built to fit the 
mats, not the reverse. It is not simply as a matter of cleanliness 
that it is necessary to take ofif boots on entering a Japanese house. 
The matting is the padding, the mattress, so to speak, on which 
the Japanese sits and lies, and must be fairly soft. Shoes and boots 
and even the lightest slippers, if they have heels, cut and tear or 
mark it very quickly. As a foot-rest it is firmer, more springy, 
and as soft as our best carpets, but for foreign use a thick rug must 
be spread over it, and the supports of foreign furniture must be 
attached to broad flat discs to distribute the weight. Under such 
conditions there is no combination of foreign matting and carpets 
to surpass it. Simply as a platform, the living foundation of the 
home life, the tatami puts the Japanese house in the front rank. 

Japanese rooms are conspicuous by the absence of furniture; 
in winter a hibachi (brazier), and sometimes a Ben or low table 
about a foot in height, of lacquered or highly polished wood, the 
legs often being curved and carved with intricate designs, usually 
being the only objects in sight. Harmony between the wall tints, 
the kakemono hang^ing in the tokonoma, a vase containing a spray 
of blossoms, relieve it of all sense of emptiness. The screens 
dividing room from room are often one of the rare subjects of 
adornment in the room — always simple and sketchy in design, and 
subdued in colour ; a branch of plum or cherry blossom, a shadowy 
flight of birds across one corner of the panel. On rare occasions 
I have seen the faintest suggestion of a landscape hidden away in 
one corner. It does one good to compare this with the ancient 
framed sampler of our great-grandmothers, " Rock of Ages," or 
a violent chromo-lithograph of the " Battle of Bunker Hill," or 
the stuffed trout so graphically describing the commercial room 
of Pickwick's day, and still a prominent feature of the furnishing 
of an average country inn even in these days. The little finger- 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 11 

catches sunk in the edge of the screens to give the grip necessary to 
slide them back are also a means of adornment. Sometimes the 
size of a large buckle, oftener no larger than an English penny, 
these little bronze plates are adorned with all sorts and kinds of 
figures, a spray of blossoms, a grotesque, or a daimio's train in 
which, in the space of an inch, there may be crowded a dozen 
tiny figures and a landscape and a house. I remember putting up 
at a beautiful little inn in an out-of-the-way spot in Kyushu. I was 
the only guest, and the only one likely to be there for some time. 
It was a famous shrine, and at certain seasons only, when the im- 
perial envoy was sent with presents to the shrine, was there any 
outside interest in the place. Hence the whole upper floor of the 
inn was thrown wide open. There were six large chambers and in 
each chamber there were sixteen of these little discs. And no two 
of the whole ninety-six were alike. I was free to roam at will over 
the whole space, with no wretched guide at hand to urge one on 
at express speed from object to object, expediting one through a 
tube, so to speak, in order to get at the next batch of victims and 
" backsheesh." The Japanese room does not stand strictly by 
itself. It is essentially a part of the outside landscape and is so 
open everywhere to outside nature that it really forms a piece 
with it. The little section of garden visible from it is part of the 
furnishing. 

Our shutters thrown back, the flood of light heralds the 
entrance of Okamisan. To no other hands are to be entrusted the 
plumage which convention requires the master of the house to weai 
in addition to his skin. With a Japanese, his kimono is hung on 
him much as in general any other child is looked after. The folds 
must hang gracefully, and all the accessories are to be so close to 
hand that he does not have the exertion of reaching for them. 
In fact about all he does do himself, in his own home, is to perform 
the necessary early ablutions. This is done at a little stand on the 
edge of the house, looking into the garden. A shining brass basin 
holds the water, dipped (not by him) from a large bucket, in 
which floats a primitive wooden dipper made by cutting- a hole in 



12 SAKURAMBO 

washing the teeth, and on the stand are lying a number of frayed 
a round box, much hke the old fashioned fig-boxes, with heavy 
bottom and very thin sides, and inserting a piece of bamboo as 
handle. Another smaller brass basin holds some boiled water for 
wood tooth-brushes, used once and then rejected, and a cheap and 
efficient instrument. The only miserable feature about the equip- 
ment is the towel, for its artistic features do not make up for its 
diminutive size. Where two nations are involved, the subsequent 
proceedings require concessions on both sides, for few foreigners 
will allow the wife to act the valet, and yet the formalities of the 
native code are to be conformed to, and she must at least superin- 
tend the operation. The care of the man is her peculiar business, 
and not to be relegated to any one if she is physically able to per- 
form it. It is the custom to say that the Japanese wife is really 
a sort of upper servant, that her wishes have no weight whatever, 
that the contract is all freedom of action and direction on the man's 
side and all performance on the woman's side. It seems to me 
that such is not the case in affairs of the household. Social life 
in our sense of the word is so lacking among the Japanese that 
outside the home the spheres of man and woman are widely sepa- 
rated, and outside the house his sphere is practically unbounded 
and unrestrained, but in the house her sphere of action is a wide 
one, and the man afts more as adviser and police force on such 
rare occasions as when a stronger arm is needed and some yaka- 
mashii ninsokii (noisy coolie) is to be dealt with. It is frankly 
to be confessed that much of this freedom is due to the care taken 
not to disturb his masculine eminence with the trifling matters of 
the house; but the wife has the silent support of the household in the 
fixed routine of domestic life, and if the man violated the hundred 
and one little conventions established by years of usage, he would 
quickly feel that a sort of interdict was ruling throughout the 
establishment. While many a patient wife would put up with 
freaks of the wildest kind, the rest of them would not. The 
household emphasizes the importance of certain conventions in the 
domestic life that define the privileges of a woman in her home, 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 13 

the right to be the domestic vizier, so to speak. So important was 
the right of position of the wife as mistress of the eastern house- 
hold, that in cases of hopeless sterility the child of a concubine was 
born in her presence, even between her feet, and from the hour of 
its appearance was of her and belonged to her, and the real mother 
had no place or portion in it. In the case of adoption of the grown- 
up child of a concubine, although the mother had not only borne but 
brought the child up, all the ties of years were broken between 
them in an instant by a legal formality and the child's duty passed 
to a stranger, his mother becoming only a servant to him, and to 
whom he must regulate his conduct as such — a hard fate for the 
son, an atrocious one for the mother. The life of the concubine 
was, and is to-day, in its domestic relations, a hard one, after the 
early glamour of the connection has passed away, but the position 
of the wife has always been very different. It is the result of grave 
diplomatic arrangements between two families, arrangements with 
which both she and her husband have had but little to say. A 
rupture of the relationship involves as many people as a Kentucky 
feud, in the old days and among the upper classes, a condition of 
affairs quite likely to result. To divorce a wife without good 
cause was like throwing a stone in a pool : the disturbance might 
spread to the farthest confines. Divorce was easy, but its burden 
was not light. The lot of the Japanese wife is not a happy one in 
our western sense, but she has rarely any abuse, in a physical sense 
of the word, and the main feature is neglect from a man whom 
perhaps she never saw before she married him. 

In those early days, say a hundred thousand years ago, when 
man and the cave-bear were engaged in mutual pursuit, it perhaps 
was the custom for the strong arm of physical force to have its 
own way during the whole twenty-four hours. Since that time, 
however, the real restraints placed on women have been the con- 
ventions raised by women themselves. The genus homo is a gre- 
garious animal, and gregarious animals allow no departure from the 
norm. If the Great Teacher had addressed women when He said, 
" Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone," Magdalen's 



14 SAKURAMBO 

fate would have been sealed in the twinkling of an eye. Man has 
been known to long for a desert island, far from the " madding 
crowd," with a surplus of sun, sleep, and cocoanuts. Woman's 
ideals point to the biggest place with the biggest shops she can find, 
even if she has to tdke the husband with the biggest purse to get 
there. Only a genius like George Eliot could have her hero poor — 
and happy. And her genius is referred to the masculine type. 
Now by all this I mean to offer the suggestion that a good part of 
the self-effacement of the Japanese woman is owing, not to treat- 
ment by men, but by her own sex. In the West the sex have 
gained a preponderant position over the male in everything but 
political life and the rougher ways of getting bread and butter. 
After all, life is a battle in which a good many kicks and cuffs have 
to be exchanged of very necessity, and more than one advanced 
woman's voice is raised against the intrusion, too far, of women 
into this struggle, not for any tender consideration of the enemy, 
man, but for fear that in becoming a competitor woman will tender 
back to man many of the inestimable privileges her physical weak- 
ness has extorted from his passion. Familiarity breeds contempt, 
and they recognize that it is the unfamiliar in women that attracts 
men. Many women are by the exigencies of life required to enter 
into the world's struggle, but almost universally they complain of 
its coarseness and it^, buffets. Most of them expect to find the same 
consideration in business that they meet in the social world ; in that 
world where life itself is at stake, as in that world to which men 
withdraw for a few minutes to get their breath ; the time of armis- 
tice as compared with the time of battle. There is plenty of 
woman's work in the world, quite as arduous as any work of man ; 
but her very physical nature has separated woman in some respects 
from the continuous toil required of the male, and has subjected 
her to conditions which require her withdrawal for a time "from the 
world's arena. The western woman has won her freedom from 
most of the restraint that is placed on the idler moments of life. 
She can take a mate or not as she pleases, accept " Eve's curse " 
or not as she pleases, but in going beyond this point and demanding 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 15 

that she carry her privileges on to the field of battle, it is to be 
feared that she is running against a law of nature; the struggle 
is for existence, and in it there are no privileges of sex, and more 
kicks than " ha'pence." 

The world does not go backward. During the early years in 
which man is imbibing ideas as ineradicable as language, he is in 
the hands of women. It is woman who has pretty thoroughly 
subjugated man, not man who has subjugated woman ; and the 
restrictions placed on her private and public life as a' woman are re- 
strictions drawn up and enforced by her own sex. And this holds 
good in the East as well as in the West. With a difference of 
degree, for a seat in the diet or on the bench is not yet within the 
horizon of the Japanese woman. In other respects her sphere 
seems more to be confined by a harsher religious code, and a 
harsher social code as applied by her own sex, than falls to the lot 
of women in the West. To our Anglo-Saxon freedom she in no 
way approximates, but the comparison is perhaps fairer if made 
with the Latin countries of southern Europe, in which the Church 
comes so strongly to the support of the social code there in practice. 
I think the term religion could be applied here to the Confucian 
code as applied to women, although it is generally described as a set 
of practical moral maxims, as ethical, not metaphysical or religious. 
Such a cold set of formal morality as pure Confucianism would 
hardly appeal to women unless it were grafted, as it has been, into 
the religious codes of the East, hiding its iron hand under a velvet 
glove. Under such form the doctrine of unquestioning obedience 
to parents and husband takes on a sanctity equivalent to any funda- 
mental principle of salvation as laid down in western theologies. 
The only reward that woman has in life is that as she becomes old 
she becomes the object of such reverence, and as it has been ground 
into her in early life, so she grinds it into the younger generation, 
left, as with us, to her charge during the earlier and more impres- 
sionable years. Social life among a people devoted to an elaborate 
etiquette is no trifle in itself, and now to a thousand and one little 
details is to be added the stamp of this Confucian maxim of obedi- 



16 SAKURAMBO 

ence. And this sometimes leads to startling results, as looked at 
by western standards, as in the sale of women to an evil life to 
relieve the necessities of parents. The Japanese, I think, are often 
regarded as a non-religious race, but my experience has been much 
the opposite. They take their religion differently, but it enters at 
least as thoroughly into their life as in western nations. As usual, 
the women are more religious than the men. The men would not 
have to raise a finger to maintain the subordinate position of 
women. The old Chinese philosopher has done it all for them, and 
the Japanese woman presses her scourge of thorns into her flesh 
rejoicing. It can be imagined that the social code, the restrictions 
women have based on such a religion, are none of the lightest. 
Among such an impersonal people as the Japanese, a people that 
hardly know the use of the personal pronoun except in the vaguest 
kind of way, there are not the individual aspirations to rebel against 
such a system. Such aspirations, if they dared to raise their head, 
would quickly be crushed out by an intolerant public opinion so 
universal as to be annihilating. The irregularity that is so fostered 
in nature by the Japanese is not tolerated in their social code. 
Self-sacrifice is the fundamental principle on which woman's relig- 
ion rests in Japan. Without it there is no salvation in this world 
or the next. It is works not faith that count, and lack of duty to 
parents or overlord is indeed rewarded with the hottest hell-fire of 
a very ingeniously imagined hell. Unnatural conduct to parents is 
equivalent to sacrilege in the West. 

I don't think that any of this is in O Kami San's head as we 
hear the last rumble of the to and the flap-flapping of the little 
Japanese whisks beating walls, tatami, furniture, and everything 
within reasonable reach of the neya's (maid-servant's) arm. This 
flapping is the earliest sign of domestic life in the Japanese house. 
I do not know that the little broom is peculiarly effective. Jap- 
anese houses look, and on the surface are, peculiarly clean. I have 
my doubts, however, and I think with some basis of fact. At 
times in the summer season, when there is a little scare anticipated 
or actually threatened of cholera or plague, there is a general house- 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 17 

cleaning ordered by the police, who, moreover, act as general over- 
seers, being reserved in the ordinary trend of Japanese events for 
the arduous task of looking on, taking presumably keen pleasure in 
seeing others work. Below the hill, in the town itself, is a quarter 
largely devoted to tiny houses many of them not covering more 
than half a dozen mats in total floor-space. x\lways wide open 
in summer weather from end to end, there is not a sign of dirt or 
litter; and yet on such cleaning- occasions, when tatami and even 
flooring are taken up, and every crevice is thoroughly cleaned and 
scrubbed under vigilant eyes, the amount of rubbish — two or three 
barrels to a house — is extraordinary. Where it comes from, it is 
hard to say, but it looks as if the little broom drove everything into 
the crevices, or dispersed the finer dust in the air, to settle back 
again in its old place as soon as the maid's back was turned. 
However that may be, the Japanese housewife has great confidence 
in it, and the occasions of a general turnout are comparatively rare 
as compared with the West, where open windows, furniture massed 
in a corner, and a general scrubbing process on a large scale make 
an eternal rotation through the house from room to room, like a 
domestic wandering in the wilderness. Part of this debris that I 
speak of undoubtedly belongs to the outside of the house, for the 
Japanese, if finicky about their immediate surroundings, are ex- 
tremely indifferent to anything beyond their noses, and by no 
means pay the attention to things beyond and under the house line 
that they do to matters within it. Something extremely offensive 
may arouse them to a point beyond the expression kusai (smelly), 
but it has to be something pretty strong at that. However, in 
cholera season they do really get to work, and when on several 
occasions there has been reason to fear an epidemic, such an appar- 
ently superficial method as water justifies itself by the excellent 
results. This cleaning is not carried out blindly, under orders. 
A preliminary is the distribution of a notice setting out the disease, 
the hygiene to be adopted, with all the whys and wherefores clearly 
explained, and the remedial measures to be adopted. It is the 



18 SAKURAMBO 

unknown that frightens, and this house to house distribution of 
these lucid Httle notices obviates a great deal of panic. 

Meanwhile, our flapping cannot last forever, and is really the 
agreeable preliminary to breakfast. Japanese food has been most 
thoroughly abused. Even long-resident foreigners abuse it (which 
is natural), and declare it unsatisfying (which is not wholly 
accurate). All food is a matter of custom and climate, and often 
climate can overcome custom, as witness the evidence of men who 
have spent winters in the North living exclusively on seal blubber 
and walrus steak. In fact, the balance is singularly good between 
carbon and nitrogen, but it is prepared in a way foreign to western 
usage. There is no common point between eastern and western 
cooking. The westerner travelling in the interior of the country, 
living at Japanese inns and on Japanese food, gets quite enough 
to eat. The food is not tasteless — in fact, is often unpleasantly the 
reverse ; but it is not to his taste. In fact there is no greater tyrant 
than the stomach even in health. It has all the prejudice of patriot- 
ism in its narrowest sense, and man will agree sooner with his 
foreign neighbour's politics than with his cooking. Hence, 
although fish are a common article of diet in Japan, many varieties of 
them as distinct to the Japanese palate as beef and pork, and dished 
up in as many different ways, to the westerner they are rarely more 
than insipid, sometimes worse. Hence such forms of cooking as 
at first please grow wearisome in a short time by repetition. The 
native finds it hard to understand why the foreigner should travel 
through the country districts with a commissariat as great as if the 
land was a Sahara. In truth, the Japanese are more adaptable, 
and live year in and year out in foreign countries and on foreign 
food, to an extent the westerner would find almost impossible to 
become accustomed to in the reverse case. This is no compliment 
to western food, for the Japanese prefer their own way of cooking, 
and are only too glad to get back to it. Apparently, they find mucli 
in western food that is pleasing to the palate, but they readily get 
tired just as in the case of the European. However, superiority, 
better adaptability, in a broad sense, has nothing to do with this 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 19 

question. They can and do work as hard and as long on their 
diet as the European does on his, and probably better than they 
themselves would on the, bread and beer or wine of the European. 
In fact, the pure push and pull labour of the East certainly is 
far in excess of anything we have in western countries ; and it is 
to be doubted that if an average were taken of man-labour ex- 
pressed in terms of horse-power, the western average would cut 
a very respectable figure beside the eastern average. There would 
be found more men in the West able to carry very heavy burdens 
far in excess of eastern capacity, but the standard man, forming' 
the great middle section, and far exceeding in numbers the others, 
would be found in the East. As to the other phase of this subject 
— the form of preparation — the Japanese with the same material 
prefer their own method of putting it together. They are very 
fond of sweets (kzuashi). They put sugar into many things in 
connection with which the foreign mind would fly at once to vine- 
gar and pepper, or at least to salt. It is a favourite way of pre- 
paring fish. They do not use the sugar alone but add flour to it. 
These are to them the palatable forms. They are excellent cooks, 
and can simulate the skill if not the originality of a French cook, 
rather astonishing when the question of condiments and sauces is 
so foreign to their own taste. All the attractive forms of western 
pastry are within the range of the Japanese kitchen, and yet they 
are not used. It is not a question of milk, for at this date the 
milkman's cart is a common sight in all Japanese cities, although 
the country districts still refrain from its use. 

It is worth looking into the place where this food is being 
prepared for a dozen people — not a difficult task. Instruments of 
cooking in western style, and totally mysterious anyhow to the 
ignorant male. But it is the dimensions of the place that strike the 
eye ; 6 by 4 feet will cover it amply. A couple of stoves much in 
size and shape akin to an assayer's furnace for his crucibles : one 
is devoted to the rice; on the other, various adjuncts take their 
turn, and in some mysterious way are kept hot. A small stand 
or chadansu holds the different ingredients necessary to savour the 



20 SAKURAMBO 

food. The sakanayasan (fishmonger) does the cleaning and 
preparation of the fish. A low stand answers for any rolling or 
cutting required in situ, and the centre of the kitchen itself is sunk 
a foot or eighteen inches to a level with the outside ground, the 
iriguchi or entrance forming one side of the room and the general 
means of approach for the tradesmen connected with that depart- 
ment of the establishment. Certainly not an elaborate outfit. 
These tradesmen are an interesting feature in themselves. They 
are daily or occasional visitors according to the aristocracy of their 
pursuits. The rice man only appears at stated intervals ; rice being 
the daily bread of the household, it is bought in bulk, a hundred 
pounds or more at a time. There is great difference in rice, 
and closely does O Kami San inspect the mass as to the quality of 
the rice itself and the care which has been taken in cleaning it. 
The purity of the sample is a matter of no little importance, for 
it is eaten boiled and without butter or condiments, a form which 
grows very attractive, and in a short time will be found preferable 
to more elaborate methods of preparation. One would never sus- 
pect rice of so much individuality until he tries it. Rice is a staple 
product, and its fluctuations in price a matter of such general public 
knowledge that there is no bargaining involved in this item of 
domestic supply. Very different is the case with Ohdsan from the 
country, who appears at times with vegetables and flowers. Price 
and freshness have both to be well looked to, for, all bows and 
smiles, she is keen as a needle underneath, and the quarter of a 
cent will be a great diplomatic victory to her. In addition, there 
is the boy from the corner store, so here there is competition. The 
corner store is a counterpart of the same in western life. The 
merchant sits on his mats and in the centre, his vegetables being 
distributed around the edge or in front. He is behind his counter 
as much as his western confrere. At stated times the boy goes out 
with orders, or to take orders at customers' houses. His stock is 
much the same as in the West, with some purely eastern products 
thrown in and some purely western products omitted. He sends 
out a book which is settled at stated intervals, or paid on the spot. 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 21 

duly stamped and receipted. Across the street is the baker, for the 
Japanese store not being adapted for baking, the baker has a more 
complete monopoly, such as it is, of such products than in the West, 
although their use is anything but general, and away from the large 
towns he is a curiosity. 

The milkman is another feature of Japanese city life. Deliv- 
ery is usually made in bottles and twice a day, and dairies are to be 
found sprinkled all over the immediate suburbs. Arable land is 
too valuable in Japan to be wasted in pasture, therefore they have 
no pasture land worth speaking of, and the cows attached to these 
dairies seem to lead a melancholy life in bare and confined 
enclosures. The milk, however, is good, but should invariably be 
boiled or sterilized before using, as in fact should be done with 
any milk; in the East, however, chances cannot be taken that in 
many parts of the West would hardly be considered chances. 
Modern artificial fertilization is a purely western growth. For 
centuries the eastern man has followed nature, and night-soil has 
been the main, almost the only, means of restoring its strength to 
the hard-worked ground. Where every available inch of ground 
is rec[uired to feed the people, land cannot be allowed to lie fallow. 
Such a method of fertilization, however, as night-soil carries its 
plain dangers wnth it. Between irrigation and such fertilization 
every running stream in the low inhabited land is a shining poten- 
tial poison. Man without knowing anything of germ theories has 
found this out. He does not drink cold water. He drinks tea 
or boiled water. Provided the well has not reached the point at 
which the water is offensive to Japanese taste, it is always available. 
The only thing to cause its disuse is for it to go dry, and that is 
not very likely in a rainy island country. W^est and East have 
solved the sanitary problem differently, and the East has solved 
it permanently — solved it, for with their overcrowded population 
and agricultural needs of irrigation, the liberal methods of Europe 
and America are out of the question ; as much out of the question 
for the large cities as for the continuous stretch of country popu- 
lation spread over the surface of the land. They have not the 



22 SAKURAMBO 

ground to devote to forming large watersheds to supply pure water 
to large communities, and they have not the water to furnish both 
for general use and for irrigation purposes. If the large com- 
munities can avoid disease by drinking tea, why should they go 
to the large expense of establishing filters which in themselves take 
up tracts of ground better used for growing rice? So argues the 
Oriental, and g^oes on drinking tea; and on the whole, with a 
soupgon of cleanliness in the community, getting along pretty well. 
In Japan, where there is not religious prejudice to thwart sanitary 
ideas as to cleansing' and fumigation, they manage without the im- 
provements necessary to secure an ideally pure water supply, and 
which involve vast cost even in a country where the available supply 
from the mountains is so close at hand and so abundant. East and 
West have practically attained the same end by different means. 
The West runs its refuse directly into the streams, and then filters it 
out again to render the water fit to drink. The East runs its refuse 
indirectly into the streams by the irrigation canals, and then boils 
the water to make it fit to drink. On the whole, in the end the 
western method is perhaps the more dangerous. The population is 
not getting the training it must come to in the end. We are pam- 
pering ourselves, although we frankly confess, in the case of our 
cities lying in low land, far from any pure source of supply, that 
something must b^done. We filter the water and reduce our sick- 
rate, which a freshet or a defective filter sends cheerfully bounding 
upward. Thousands of people live on and by the river at Canton, 
drinking sewage, and managing to hold their own. The westerner 
living in the East must take the native as example. And more : 
no fresh, crisp salads — his greens must be boiled; no fresh, 
delicate-flavored ground-fruits. No finer strawberries are grown 
than are grown in the East. Many westerners eat and do not die ; 
as ditto the native. And of those who do eat, some die who would 
have died in the course of nature anyhow. 

The most important, however, of our day's visitors in the mer- 
cantile line' is the sakanayasan or fishmonger. About eleven 
o'clock this main feature of the supply, the piece de resistance, 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 23 

makes his appearance and his apologies. The fish are very dear 
on account of the scarcity of the fish, or the obstinacy of the fisher- 
men, bad weather preventing their going out, or laziness, or a 
matsuri, or a dozen and one other reasons. O Kami San is quite 
up to all these statistics. She knows what fish are in season and 
what out of season; the date and extent of every matsiovi is at her 
fingers' ends ; and if the fishermen have been lazy, or obstinate, or 
deterred by bad weather, then the long strip of fishing-boats com- 
ing in from Hanawa Point or from the Negishi side must have 
gone out for their own amusement. These are the preliminary 
features of the argument, and, once having impressed the extent 
of her knowledge, the bargaining gets down to the more legitivnate 
feature of prices as ruling among the various kinds of fish. As 
fish take the place of meat with the Japanese, this question of 
variety is far more important in the bill of fare than with us — ■ 
variety not only in name but in quality. Some fish, such as 
maguro and same, have a distinctly meaty flavour, a stronger, 
harsher flavour; others are softer in texture and more delicate, 
and again others distinctly of the trifling nature of an entree, such 
as the ehodai or the different forms of ai or trout. In fact, 
whether due to cooking or skilful alternation — a sort of rotation of 
crops, so to speak — a Japanese meal made up of fish and rice can 
present contrasts between the courses, not so striking as with our 
cooking, but ample enough to give variety. Some of these fish 
of daily household use are particularly palatable. The tai runs 
through a whole gamut of the " breams," from the highly appreci- 
ated akadai or red tai to the succulent little ehodai. Mutsu is a 
fish coming with the cold weather and lasting until late spring. In 
some respects it has a distinct flavour of the shad, and the flesh 
is very tender and delicate, albeit with very few bones to distract 
the attention from the flavour. Boi'a is somewhat firmer in tex- 
ture, but with delicate flavour ; and maguro, which is a large fish, 
cuts up intO' steak like meat. The kurodai and shirame are fish 
of almost daily appearance with the fishmonger's stock, but are 
somewhat insipid. All the larger fish furnish roe and sashimi 



M SAKURAMBO 

or sliced raw fish. This is preferably taken from the live fish, the 
operator using skill to avoid all vital parts, and cutting as needed 
from the fish. The shirame gives a sashimi very delicate and 
white, and the maguro a firm, red sashimi. The sakanayasan 
cleans all fish, and if sashimi is ordered, prepares it, or brings it 
prepared. The first is preferable on the same principle that, 
although painful, it is important to see the lobster go kicking and 
objecting into the pot. In fact, the more he kicks the better we 
are pleased, gastronomically, on sanitary grounds, and the less 
likely is he to kick after eating, or to manufacture or recall for us 
a line of ancestors. A little pyramid of horse-radish (wjsabi), a 
larger one of shredded daikon or Japanese radish, and of kohu, 
a succulent green, with a sprig of sansa (herb) is symmetrically 
arranged with the sashimi laid in two parallel lines on broad hi- 
no-ki leaves, the whole forming a very cool and pleasing dish. 
As with everything eatable, the sashimi should be carefully kept in 
a fly-proof safe, and this also is an important reason why it should 
be cut from the living fish. In fact, in the fly season it is better 
to avoid its use altogether, as also the use of all kinds of uncooked 
food. It can be seen now that the sakanayasan' s duties do not con- 
sist simply in exchanging his wares for cash. The bargaining 
over, he becomes for a few minutes a member of the household, 
working away with his hands and chattering with his tongue, for 
his acquaintance is wide-spread in the neighbourhood, and his 
opportunities of conversation extensive. Personal character 
counts for much with the sakanayasan, and if otonashii, a quiet and 
good-tempered animal, his daily visit is a feature affording food 
both mental and physical. His business over, he balances his 
tubs on his shoulders and makes off, lighter in burden and with 
items more or less substantial added to his chronique scandaleuse. 
Other requirements of Japanese household life go on much as in 
our western homes. The gomiyasan or garbage-collector is a 
municipal feature. At New Year's and the Bon Matsuri it is cu - 
tomary to give him a little present. Another cleans out the wells 
and cesspools on the premises. He has a district for his private 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 25 

round, and collects five to fifty cents a month for his labour. Ten 
to twenty cents a month covers the expense for quite an extensive 
Japanese house. In the ex-treaty ports, gas and water attach- 
ments are looked after by the company's employes, just as with 
us, their duties ceasing with the property of the company, and 
elsewhere a private plumber being a necessity if things go wrong 
in the house itself. A number of itinerants drop in during the 
day: countrymen with flowers or vegetables, the hokiyasan or 
broom man — a Japanese broom being cheap and evanescent — beg- 
gars, mendicant priests sent out by their fraternities, charitable 
committees seeking to pension deserving paupers or publish unde- 
serving poems, to send blankets " to the front " or sell flags for 
the same good purpose, and at times a policeman to keep tab on 
the population and the safety of Dai Nippon. 

Now, in re breakfast, I will frankly confess that this particu- 
lar breakfast is anything but Japanese. Accustomed as one can 
get to Japanese food, a Japanese breakfast is too much like dinner 
to answer for that meal. It seems to me that the beauty of western 
home economy lies in the balance of the two meals a day — for the 
third meal, whether coffee and roll on rising or milk and roll for 
luncheon, should be more name than substance. The Scotch- 
American breakfast and the continental table d'hote perhaps form 
the ideal combination. Americans get their dyspepsias not from 
overeating but from hasty eating, and as a nation are anything but 
gouty. And the Scotch, in literature anyhow, make but little com- 
plaint of that disease. The English, however, make a substantial 
luncheon, a heavy dinner, and a good supper, jamming three fairly 
complete meals into a rapid succession of feeding beginning at noon 
and lasting until midnight. And they are notoriously gouty. 
The continental European can hardly point the finger at them, 
for he holds his due proportion of the victims at the different Bads, 
and walks his little round and nibbles his little biscuit, sips and 
o^.nnks nauseating waters, and generally abandons his vin rouge 
and vin mousseux for sackcloth and ashes for a limited season. 
And he too jams two table d'hotes and a supper into the same 



26 SAKURAMBO 

limited time. The Japanese would probably hold up their end also 
at Carlsbad and Homburg, if they were within reaching distance 
of it, but for different reasons — for dyspepsia, not gout. As to a 
coolie you can see his rice take up its journey through his oeso- 
phagus practically unmasticated in the original ball, a shape of 
which he is particularly fond. The man who ate nineteen mince- 
pies in nineteen minutes could easily be matched at any ricksha 
stand, provided the food was to the coolie's taste, and the Japanese 
would not know he had entered into any competition. To him it 
would be the normal method of procedure. 

I think these peculiarities of nations are shown by a very 
every-day piece of evidence in the newspapers — the patent medicine 
advertisements. Once when travelling in the southern United 
States, being impressed by the number of large, sluggish rivers 
it was necessary to cross, and the sallow appearance of the inhabi- 
tants, I made inquiry as to whether malaria was not common in the 
district. The hotel-clerk waved his hand : " Never heard of it, 
sir." In fact, he intimated a little jaundice, perhaps, on my part, 
making me see yellow, and transfixed me with his diamond and 
asphyxiated me with his suavity. Still I had misgivings, and, 
strange to say, the drug-stores seemed to have little stock but qui- 
nine and " Antishake." The rest was fly-blown. That clerk told 
a tale that night to the assembled " drummers," how he preferred 
town to the country because he had time to shave between chills, 
and did not cut himself. They had not only chills but a liar or two 
in Arkansas. Now the Japanese prevalent advertisements largely 
recall American advertisements : very thin men become abnormally 
fat and shaking hands with each other over the change, pills and 
boluses for the stomach, and " detonators " to jar sluggish livers — • 
and, right under one's eyes, at any Japanese hotel, the cause of it 
all. The tray goes into the apartment stored with little dishes and 
full contents. In a trice nesan appears again, all the dishes a 
howling wilderness; and three times (en regie) has the little rice- 
bowl travelled back to her to be refilled. Now the human boa- 
constrictor sits sipping tea and swelling up the mass of rice in his 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 27 

stomach, until, in an alarming number of cases, that overworked 
organ goes on strike- — almost the only effective kind of strike 
known in Japan. It is a fact, speaking from the cold statistical 
side of the subject, that stomach diseases are a very important 
feature of such returns, and ulcers and cancer of the stomach a 
far too large proportion of the bills of mortality. They are. not 
a drinking people, their oriental nerves are quite equal to any 
strain on the point of smoking-, their food is digestible and well 
cooked, and yet they suffer frightfully. The only unfavourable 
factor is their method of eating, which must be held responsible 
for the bad results obtained. No! only the tray and the dishes 
present native features in the breakfast that the little maid brings 
to O Kami San. It is too much to ask the American to give up his 
breakfast foods with their spice of controversy and his coffee with 
its spice of Java much closer at hand than at home. As to the 
latter, there can be much less controversy than when seven thousand 
miles away. As to the former, there can be as much partisanship 
as between the faithful followers of different prophets; All 
promise future happiness and life eternal ; claim the other fellow to 
be a side-show in the race, or a fraud. 

The little maid that brings the breakfast tray represents one 
side of a problem which diff'ers radically in its phases from that' 
presented to western life. I refer to the servant problem. In 
many respects there is still left a strong leaven of the pre-Restora- 
tion days of 1867, in existing relations between the members of the 
Japanese household as a whole. In the old days the relation be- 
tween master and servants seems to have been a patriarchal one. 
He had many of the qualities in loco parentis in addition to that 
of employer. Owing to this double relation his duties of care and 
protection increased with the accentuated obedience required to 
his wishes. Hence the relation assumed a permanency unknown 
in Europe for more than three hundred years; in fact, unknown 
since the emancipation of the peasantry from a condition of serf- 
dom in which the individual man had no more standing than the 
held of swine he was tending for his lord. Contests between king 



28 SAKURAMBO 

and nobles, however, quickly brought the people into play as a 
valuable factor to one side or to both, and the value of a man's 
individuality, as distinct from communalty, was not slow in making 
its appearance. Master became separated from man, and the 
material advantages as distinguished from the personal bonds 
became the dominant motives. Old and tried servants were com- 
mon enough in European houses, and many are the instances of 
devotion and sacrifice, all the greater because they were against 
the steadily drifting tide of making the relation between master 
and man purely the financial one that it has become in modern 
times, and eliminating the personal side altogether. Hence 
'* Jeems Yellowplush " could have written his memoirs of the 
Fronde with as much candour as Cardinal de Retz, and perhaps 
it is unfortunate that he has not done so. And the " Jeems " of 
that time was strikingly like the " Jeems " of the early nineteenth 
century, if we can believe the many complaints made by contem- 
porary writers as to his carelessness, fondness for his master's eat- 
ables and particularly for the drinkables, and his light-fingered 
piffection for finery — in general terms, his knavishness. 

No such relation had a chance to develop in Japan, because 
the feudal system as such remained in full force up to the present 
with but little modification, and because the groundwork of the 
prevailing moral code, being obedience to the master whether in 
relation of father or lord, lent its full weight to the imposition of 
t:he iron code which both interest and social etiquette imposed on 
all grades of society. In such a system social position and calling 
were stamped at the outset on the individual, and adding thereto the 
national lack of personality, a condition of contentment was reached 
with their lot in life very unlikely to rise to any rebellion against 
the social system. As with a handicraft, service ran in particular 
families and the connection between lord and retainer would last 
from generation to generation, the younger generation replacing 
the older as it became unfit for such service. The relation of 
familiarity thus existing between employer and employed did away 
with the menial side of the employment as looked at purely as a 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 29 

matter of gain or personal advancement. The employed gained 
a prestige from his more intimate association with his lord's family ; 
and the farther back he could point to such connection was a source 
of honest pride for it meant much as a certificate of a clean record 
of loyalty and favour. In fact, gain or wages were not a feature 
of such employment. It was a means of training for the young 
man or woman and it was so regarded. They were charges on 
their lord's bounty and it was their business to profit by their posi- 
tion to learn their various future duties of life in this best of practi- 
cal schools in which they were treated, not as paid menials, but as 
taking their share in the membership of the family. Even to this 
day this is a feature in Japanese family life. The wages are 
nominal. These young girls go out to service not to earn money 
but to learn to sew, to cook, to take care of children, and generally 
to fit themselves for their own future married life. And this must 
not he the haphazard training that so often follows now-a-days 
in the case of the western woman. Sewing is not confined to a few 
household articles and baby clothes. The Japanese woman and her 
maids are the tailors of the average Japanese home and every 
kimono that goes on her husband's back is the product of the house 
staff. All the details of measurement, ratios, stitching and double 
stitching according to rule, are taught in the home, and the Japanese 
woman when she leaves her parents' home as bride carries this 
knowledge with her, not as an accomplishment, but as a necessity. 
She may not carry it into practice herself with her own fingers, but 
like Penelope she is supposed at least to be the mastermind of her 
handmaids. Her knowledge is practical, not theoretical, and she 
has the ability to act if the occasion calls on her skill. Anyone 
who has lived in a Japanese household cannot help bemg struck by 
the large amount of this needle-work. This is in part due to the 
nature of Japanese clothing, which involves not only the making 
but the frequent remaking, for the wadded clothes of winter are 
ripped apart, washed and dried, and then put together again. 
Of course, in the average Japanese household this is all the work 
of nimble fingers, and it is only where foreign influence is at work 



30 SAKURAMBO 

that the hum of the sewing machine is heard. Home seems at 
times a sort of school or sewing bee, and it is a curious sight to see 
the Httle maids' heads together in an interested circle to watch the 
elucidation of some knotty point in sartorial mechanics as ex- 
pounded by the mistress of the house. There seems to be an 
earnestness about the whole procedure totally different from the 
carrying out of an item of household labour done by contract at 
so much a week. It is not only sewing, however, but cooking also 
which forms part of the repertoire of O Kami San. This she has 
no hand in herself, but she has practice to fall back on if necessity 
arises, and at all events the direction falls on her to effect such 
variety as the Japanese menu affords. All the little details, from 
the fly flapping in the morning through the more important mat- 
ters to the unrolling the quilts at night and hanging the big mos- 
quito net in summer, are part of the educational process of a maid 
that comes as green as the grass on the hillside. And when she 
has learnt it all her parents send for her and marry her off. That 
has been the object of her schooling, so to speak. 

So the average day passes in the household, and at five o'clock 
the tension — what there is of it — perceptibly slackens. It is the 
hour of the bath which has been for some time heating. In regular 
rotation the household enter the bath-room ; from the master down 
to the smallest neyg, there is a procession lasting until it is nearly 
time to close the house for the night. It is the most enjoyable 
feature of the day, although the great dark tub is a source of terror 
to the children, a supply of which commodity is kept on hand in 
every Japanese household. Japanese children have quite as much 
original sin in them as any other children and hate equally to have 
it washed out. They too are an important item of neya's educa- 
tion, their care and obviation of their general '' cussedness " being 
part of the curriculum, so to speak. Now in all this day's work the 
keynote is simplicity. Getting up with the sun we have hardly 
made use of the western world's artificialities and yet have got 
along very well. To cook our food we have used a furnace not so 
widely different from what will be found among the wandering 



FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 31 

tribes of northern Asia. In fact, in get-up and mechanics, it 
rivals the simphcity of the giant ant heaps of Austraha, which by 
kicking in one side can be turned into a very tolerable oven. Our 
water has come from a well which doubtless any sane board of 
health would condemn on its general surroundings without even 
analyzing it; but any harmful proclivities have been neutralized by 
boiling. The food has been much what O Kami San's for- 
bears ate a thousand 3^ears ago, and if we can judge anything from 
the books of those days they M^ould feel perfectly at home in the 
house and on the mats. Politics have changed much for the better 
and there are no swashbuckling samurai to go around testing the 
edge of their blade on harmless beggars and drunken men, and 
generally making an unpleasant mess on the sidewalk — or what 
would have been one if there had been such a thing in those days. 
Our lamps — a modern type — are fit to read by and enable us to 
extend the day with comfort far beyond the bedtime of former 
days. But without all the accessories of gas, water, electric light, 
modern plumbing, stationary washtubs, elevators, hydraulic and 
other kinds, complex furniture, asphalt paving, and a hundred 
other necessities that our western life is crying for, we have passed 
the day not only in comfort but with pleasure and profit. Books 
and people are enough for any reasonable man, and neither of 
them are peculiar to modern or western civilization. Our amuse- 
ments change in nature, not in quality. Doubtless the old Greeks 
would utterly fail in putting a modern society play on the stage, 
just as we utterly fail in putting the Greek tragedy or comedy on 
our stage, and it is hardly necessary to ask which stage is going to 
survive the world test of the centuries. A circus parade is a worse 
than shabby affair compared to a Roman triumph. We know a 
little more of Nature's secrets than the ancient world, and most of 
that we have acquired in the last hundred years ; and our pessimism 
keeps pace with our knowledge. Something of this came to mind 
looking down at the lights of the fishing village several hundred 
feet below me. These people were living identically as their fore- 
fathers for generations had lived. A kerosene lamp and a news- 



32 SAKURAMBO 

paper, to give them a mass of details on people and matters outside 
the circle of their own hopes and fears, were the only additional 
items. A few miles away was a city crying out for electric trams, 
pure water, harbour improvement, and increased taxation. What 
was a man to think? These fisherfolk were happy as the world 
goes, although they had their neighbours' example close under their 
eyes. Their neighbours with their added western materialism and 
restlessness had not added to their content. Western roses have 
thorns, and increase the points of contact the more they will prick. 
And yet these roses are tempting to sight. The thorns are hidden 
and young Japan not overly conservative. 



II 



BOSHU WAY 

" High in the air the rock its summit shrouds 
In brooding tempests, and in rolling clouds ; 
Loud storms around, and mists eternal rise, 
Beat its bleak brow and intercept the skies." 

— Odyssey (Pope's translation.) 

One of the pleasantest features of Japanese character is its 
contentment. I do not mean that contentment which is associated 
with a sort of vegetable existence too lazy or too stupid to want 
to move out of its environment. Japanese content is far from any 
relation with such a phase ; but, on the contrary, it is the strongest 
evidence of the completeness with which the people as a whole 
have entered into the inward meaning and spirit of their surround- 
ings. Now this artistic sympathy with their nature environment 
is not inborn in a race. It is a sign of age. The young pioneer 
nations have not the time to feel that sympathy with Nature that 
is found in an older civilization. Nature to them is unsubdued, 
and it is part of their daily labour to contend with her. The 
American pioneer could hardly be expected to look with unadulter- 
ated pleasure on the forests of the Miami and Monongahela. 
His object was to establish a home, and to him those forests repre- 
sented the hardest labour in clearing them away. A wearisome 
monotonous course of felling, stumping, splitting, and hauling by 
main force so many thousand feet of timber in order to get at the 
ground and make it produce for him his daily bread. It was the 
trapper and explorer that could find time and inclination to appre- 
ciate the " murmuring pine and the hemlock." The husbandman 
on the contrary heard with joy of the rolling plains of Kansas 
and Nebraska, with few trees but those found in the river bottoms, 
and miles of prairie grass to feed and fatten his cattle. The 

33 



34 SAKURAMBO 

Japanese have long finished their contest with Nature in the rough, 
and this has taken on that sleepy immobility that is found in a top 
— " movement internal, rest external." The result has been that 
Nature has passed from the stage of being an active enemy, to that 
of a friend whose every peculiarity is known by long acquaintance. 
There is all the charm associated with intimate knowledge and 
pride of conscious superiority. Now this completeness with which 
Nature arouses and satisfies the aesthetic feelings has never reached 
the same development in the West that it has among the Japanese. 
Elaboration is the keynote, the entrance on the scene of more or 
less of the strictly human element, and a village of cafes, beer 
gardens, and hotels, with or without music, is certain to spring 
up around any great attraction of Nature until it is hard to tell 
which draws the crowd — Nature or the beer garden. So with the 
theiatre. The cost of production is growing to be a more important 
feature in the advertising than the play itself, and as the manager 
knows or tries to know his public, it is fair to assume that he 
judges it accurately for the benefit of his own pocket. The Jap- 
anese have as yet taken but a short step on this road, although likely 
to go further as time goes on. At present the tea house in its 
development is distinctly the merest adjunct to the attraction, a 
re.st, house not an object in itself. With all the means of amuse- 
ment that are foun^ among the Japanese as among other peoples — 
music, dancing, pantomime, the stage, character sketches and story 
telling — the Japanese never mix them with natural scenery. Mar- 
gate and Coney Island are found at Asakusa, not across the river 
at Mukojima where the crowds of people go in April to view the 
cherry-blossoms. 

Mukojima and a host of other places it can be said is an in- 
stance of the fact that the Japanese appreciate colour in mass, for 
it is common to see it stated that to them the highest form of 
enjoyment of flowers is the single spray appropriately arranged in 
a vase. This has indeed been brought to a fine art. Perhaps when 
the Japanese woman is " emancipated " it will be found that the 
time now devoted to training in such subjects as flower arrange- 



BOSHU WAY 35 

merit and the tea ceremony will have to be curtailed and devoted 
to studies which will put her more on a par with man, to whom 
she will be not only wife but companion. It is undoubtedly the 
case that the western woman has not reached her present develop- 
ment without sacrificing something. There are only twenty-four 
hours in the day, and much of that is required by the simple neces- 
sity of ordinary living. But it is a question as to what is going 
to be of more value to the race; the tea ceremony or a course in 
hygiene as applied to the household; the arrangement of flowers 
or the ability to hold her own in that general- social life which is 
bound to come even in Japan. After all, both tea ceremony and 
flower arrangement have reached their highest development and 
are now living on their past reputation. The period of seclusion 
has passed away and new duties require a new training. As 
Europe treasures its old traditions and bewails the decadence of 
these present days in all the finer qualities of man's nature, so the 
Japanese will cling to their old traditions and masterwork, retain 
as much of the old as conditions allow, and gradually replace it 
with the new. Doubtless a millennium from now our descendants 
will equally be able to look back on arts which seem lost to them. 
The present age may not be very fruitful from the aesthetic point of 
view but periods of great material and political activity rarely are 
so. Man's mind after all is limited. Leaders are rare. This is 
an age of science and of politics, lines are changing rapidly in both 
spheres, and the mental material available to guide these changes is 
mainly occupied in that direction. Whether the Japanese will 
ever come to our " hideous bouquets " so often held up to derision 
is doubtful. The said bouquet is largely a back number now in the 
West and rarely figures except at weddings and funerals and the 
debutante's first plunge into the social world. The Japanese lack 
the one flower which is really effective in that form, the rose. No 
westerner will admit any standing to the Japanese " hara " and 
it is not at all surprising that the Japanese have very little regard 
for it themselves. The rose is a strictly western flower. Whether 
as a single masterpiece — the " American Beauty " — arranged a la 



S6 SAKURAMBO 

Japonaise on a maiden's bosom, or en masse covering a whole house 
as seen in southern Cahfornia, it outrivals any flower in the East 
in grace and beauty and fragrance. No more can be asked of the 
flower than the combination of these three qualities. It does not 
seem possible to acclimate the plant in Japan. Like western fruit, 
the stock soon degenerates, perhaps on account of the peculiar dis- 
tribution of heat and moisture. The Japanese, however, do enjoy 
colour in mass as shown by the many flower shows based on just 
such effect. In May crowds of people flock to the Hon jo district 
in Tokyo to see the peony show, the effect depending largely on 
the massing of the plants which are of the most varied shades of 
colour. In the middle of May Kameido is at its best, the wisteria 
blossoms reaching the length of a yard or more. Still later in early 
June and in the same district the iris gardens are ready to display 
a wonderful variety of shade of the double iris. All this pleasure 
the Japanese gets at little cost. His country is one of the most 
picturesque in the world. Every hillside on the coast gives a 
charming vista of sea, mountain, and archipelago. He goes pic- 
nicking for the flowers and the view, not for the beer, or the merry- 
go-rounds, the shoot-the-chutes, that the time and money available 
will allow him. He not only wants to enjoy himself, but he wants 
to enjoy the view, and the latter is inextricably involved as the 
chief feature of ike outing. This characteristic it is to be hoped 
they will long retain. 

Apart from the flower shows Hon jo presents but little other 
attraction. It is mainly a collection of small houses inhabited by 
fishermen and artisans and whenever plague or cholera visits 
Tokyo it is pretty sure that Hon jo has or will have a hand in it. 
However it contains a railway station, not absolutely necessary 
but still presenting great advantages over Uyeno for reaching- the 
country directly east of the great city. For several years I had 
been looking over the bay at the misty blue range of hills on the 
other side, of which Nokogiriyama and Kanozan are the most 
distinctive features. In legendary days of yore those blue inter- 
vening waters had witnessed the self-sacrifice of the Princess Oto- 



BOSHU WAY 37 

Tachibana, wife of Yamato-take the hero, then on his mission 
against the hairy men of the North ; traits of character that 
show that her sex has changed but Httle in these many years. 
Later it w^as among those hills that Yoritomo, first of the Mina- 
moto Shoguns, sought refuge, and. in fact Boshu, or Awa, seems 
to have been the refuge of those whose political fortunes were under 
a cloud. Nowadays there is no particular reason to take anyone 
there. The guide book speaks of it pleasantly but slightingly as a 
nice winter trip in which such phenomena as flowers and naked 
people were to be seen in December. Not at all wonderful as to 
the display, but as to season and about which I was somewhat 
sceptical withal for I had been led one winter to Atami, in part by 
the deceptive orange groves to be seen growing all through the 
countryside. The Japanese orange however I found to be a 
broken reed as an indicator of climate. The local orange grower 
does not sit up at nights losing sleep over cold snaps and providing 
steam heat and wood fires for his trees. The tree has a supreme 
indifference to frost or to snow and the sun comes out on the winter 
days to warm everything into life only to be locked up again in a 
zero temperature at nightfall. The ultimate result of this erratic 
treatment for a tree so delicate as the orange is a fruit of the 
mandarin size, sweet with a pleasant tart twang. 

With these cold winter nights of Atami therefore in mind I 
postponed my visit to this " shadowy land of Avilion " until the 
w'armer weather of spring made Japanese inns less of a winter 
campaign in the open. Hence the first of May found me at Hon jo 
station with a minimum of luggage and also of expectation, for 
little was anticipated beyond pleasant valleys, rice-fields laid out in 
checkerboards between low hills, and native villages recalling some 
unfortunate town which has long ago been wiped out by fire and 
rebuilt temporarily, only the inhabitants have forgotten or. been toO' 
busy to rebuild in a more substantial manner. Leaving Honjo 
this anticipation was realized ; low hills to the left and the wide 
expanse of paddy fields to the right pleasantly varied at times by 
glimpses of the bay. As Ohara, the present jumping-off place of 



38 SAKURAMBO 

the railway, is approached the hills become a feature. Travel is 
Very light on this section as most of the traffic is diverted at Chiba 
to go toward Narita and the villages near the mouth of the Tama- 
gawa. At present the Ohara line is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, the 
terminus being a tiny place, but with some little inns at which one 
can put up for the night if a sunrise start is desired down the coast. 
I managed to rout out a kuruniaya, a most ancient man who seemed 
to drop some present occupation to take me and my furniture part 
of the ten miles to Katsuura. The road was mainly good, the hills 
pleasing to the eye and much as in the neighbourhood of Kamakura, 
and some touch of interest was found in a traveller bound to 
Tokyo — a large maguro fish, some ten or twelve feet in length, 
riding in state and pushed along by a crowd of joyful fishermen. 
A good haul, for such a fish I was told was worth a hundred yen to 
the Tokyo market. My ojisan (honourable old gentleman) left 
me to my own devices at the half-way stage, a knruinaya rest house 
at the point where the road reaches the sea. This place was better 
supplied and soon I was bowling along with a pushman in addition, 
through fishing villages and tunnels with slices of road interspersed 
and which seemed to improve with its distance from metropolitan 
life. It was getting toward night and the fishermen were already 
pushing off and putting to sea for the night's work. Ten to twenty 
men to a boat, naked to a breech clout, shouting and chanting, 
pushing and tugging, but with very little misdirected effort. Old 
men and children watched the process and the gay pictured kimo- 
nos, seen in scattered cases through the " treaty ports," were here 
the general outfit. Women seemed to be otherwise engaged as 
they were conspicuous by their absence, the group of watchers 
being almost entirely men. I cannot say that my welcome at my inn 
at Katsuura was a warm one. This is one of the accidents of 
travelling in unfrequented corners and even then is of rare occur- 
rence. Misgivings as to chadai or tea money I think have little 
to do with it, for the innkeepers usually charge foreigners on a 
separate scale and incidentally get chadai in addition. There is 
perhaps an unwillingness to break the routine to cater to the possi- 



BOSHU WAY 39 

ble idiosyncrasies of the foreigner which they do not understand 
and yet in the satisfaction of which they do not want to fail. 
Again, the presence of a foreigner is ahvays a matter of curiosity 
in out of the way places and curiosity is not always pleasant to 
either innkeeper or his guests. Also, as is not unknown in the 
West, there are inns that wish to confine their custom to the native, 
The foreigner is only an occasional item in their clientele, unprofit- 
able and perhaps annoying. There is moreover another compli- 
cation for the innkeeper. The places of public resort are peculiarly 
under the thumb of the police, and they wish no trouble from that 
quarter, the simplest method therefore being that of avoidance. 
The .presence of a foreigner in a place is particularly noted. On 
application to the police, if it is feasible at all, the foreign traveller 
can get placed for the very good reason that his source of intro- 
duction is unimpeachable. If, however, he is taken in without ques- 
tion and trouble subsequently arises, the innkeeper is liable to an 
overhauling and his compliance with all the formalities gone into 
by very hypercritical judges seeking a scapegoat. Travel could 
be so hampered by a simple hint from headquarters to refuse 
accommodation that the country would practically be as close as 
before the revision of the Treaties. It happens therefore that it is 
necessary at times to make one's way good, and on such occasions 
once ensconced in the inn to lose all knowledge even fragmentary of 
the native tongue. In time they will cease dangling before the 
eyes of the obtuse foreigner the different means of exit from the 
town, and leave him alone much as one lets time and a burly 
canine planted on his premises take their course in due season. 
It can be added that it is no small matter in such cases to get 
ensconced behind the shoji. A favourable condition due simply 
to the innkeeper's hesitating frame of mind. In the morning my 
hosts and I parted company on rather cold terms. I stuffed away 
in available pockets the little book and towel which formed part of 
the external expression of our mutual forbearance toward each 
other and much etiquette was wasted on both sides. They cer- 
tainly fulfilled all the duties of a host and made a good bargain 



40 SAKURAMBO 

for me with the kunmiaya who were to take me onward as far as 
Ho jo that night. Nothing more than that can fairly be asked of 
any inn. 

It was beyond Katsuura that the pleasantness of the surprise 
of this new district came upon me. So near Yokohama, here was 
a place of which people seemed to know little and care less. From 
Katsuura to Matsuda was a succession of landscapes, cape after 
cape stretching into the ocean. In the intervening valleys the road 
ran beside the sea and through the fishing villages. Then it would 
ascend some narrow valley, gradually working its way into a sort 
of cul-de-sac and then plunging through a tunnel, giving on the 
further side a picture of land, sea, and rice-field, set as it were in 
a natural frame. From Katsuura and almost to Kamogawa the 
coast was of a bold character. The road, a sort of Corniche road, 
was cut in the face of the cliffs, and ran along at times several 
hundred feet sheer above the sea. There are places along this 
stretch, at the narrow turns on the face of the cliff, that must carry 
no little danger in a heavy gale to vehicles and even to men. The 
road is narrow and without any protection whatever. Standing on 
such a headland one looks far down the coast to Cape Nojima and 
often just at one's feet and filling the width of a narrow valley lies 
a jumble of roofs, a fishing village notable in these parts for cleanli- 
ness. So it goes on over a fairly good highway, up and down, 
through the little valleys and around the faces of the cliffs in pic- 
turesque alternation. It is not always plain sailing however. The 
tunnels are very numerous and sometimes undergoing repair. A 
stiff climb over one took me to the Nichiren temple at Kominato,- 
where I had to wait until my kurumaya arranged for our future 
progress, for the original kitruma could not be " toted " up the 
steep footway. The site of this temple is the very dubious place of 
the saint's birth ; the supposed original being under water as the 
coast is losing to the sea on this side. He has gained by the trans- 
fer, for it is the most picturesque spot in the neighbourhood. The 
lack of any obtrusively Japanese vegetation on the scene gave it a 
touch of resemblance to our western world. A well-kept shaded 



BOSHU WAY 41 

road, the " God's acre " with its temple outhne only dimly shad- 
owed among the large trees and the low wall surrounding the 
whole, recalled in a way a scene often met with on the outskirts of 
some of our country villages which have gone to sleep for the past 
sixty years or more and have never grown up to and around the 
old church placed on its outskirts. An excellent luncheon at the 
Yoshidaya at Kamogawa marked the end of this more picturesque 
section of the day's ride. Changing men I soon reached Matsuda, 
at which point the road cuts across the peninsula to Ho jo, a dis- 
tance of about eight miles. Matsuda afforded another pleasant 
surprise. Japanese towns are not conspicuous by their attractive- 
ness. In fact they are unusually commonplace and ugly, the 
graceful curves of the roofs being the only redeeming feature. 
But Matsuda recalls all the pleasing greenness of an English lane. 
The houses are hidden behind hedges and there is a long vista of 
green looking down the town. Passing under this archway of 
trees soon brings one again into open country, broader valleys and 
rice-fields broken up by fantastic hills, and over a splendid road 
by which my kurumaya, covering the eight miles in a trifle over an 
hour, landed me at the Kimuraya of Hojo. 

These excellent inns in such an out of the way corner as this 
edge of Boshu have a reason for their being. At this May season 
Hojo was empty, but the land has a reputation in the Japanese 
world for mildness in winter and for bathing in summer. Many 
of the quieter people of the better class of Tokyo make a yearly 
pilgrimage hitherward. Only one remnant still clung to the Kimu- 
raya at this off season. A venerable old gentleman who was 
accompanied by quite a large family, some of the younger members 
of which must have been granddaughters, although a Japanese 
retires from life and takes on the appearance of Ojisan so early 
that it is easy to mistake the second for the third generation. Jap- 
anese and western social life often touch at some unexpected point. 
I do not refer to the receptions, balls, and dinners given in foreign 
style in Tokyo, where men and women meet on terms akin, in out- 
ward seeming anyhow., to western usage; but to the social life as 



42 SAKURAMBO 

carried on independent of any but native usages. Women have 
their outside interests, their circles and societies for reHef of the 
poor, interests of school girls, hospital service, study of poetry, 
needlework, and a dozen and one other social objects. In the rela- 
tion of women with women the social life is free enough or could 
be made so without opposition from any source, personal or con- 
ventional. In the home circle the relations between the sexes 
is free enough. The older women join freely in conversation; 
the younger, as they do or should do elsewhere, do not volunteer 
information until they are asked. Visiting perhaps is not so 
general as with us even among the women, being largely between 
families related in some way by marriage or blood, and there is no 
such concession shown to youth as represented by social functions 
which are mainly devoted to the pleasure of the young, and which 
are conspicuously a feature of Anglo-Saxon life. The Japanese 
father does not stand around cooling his head and his heels until 
the sun rises, while some young daughter wearies herself out with 
dancing and flirtation; both to return home, she to sleep until 
midday, and he to go to his office at nine o'clock. 

The main feature of European life, the formal social inter- 
course between the sexes, is the feature that is lacking in Japanese 
life. External social life of course exists but is confined to men, 
moving much on th§ same plane as in the West, only granting dif- 
ference in national taste and always apart from the home. Formal 
dinners and any such features of social life are confined to the tea 
house. There it is that the Japanese seeks to entertain his friends 
in sittings that last for hours, and on such occasions appear the only 
touch of femininity that is allowable in such public life — the geisha. 
This little creature is a product that it is extremely hard to classify 
because western life has nothing exactly to correspond. Her 
training is entirely directed in wit and accomplishments — dancing, 
singing and playing various musical instruments^ — toward pleasing 
men, and not only men but she must gauge the tastes of her par- 
ticular employers at the time. The dancing and singing is but 
part of her " business." It is the " coffee and repartee," so to 



BOSHU WAY 43 

speak, between these intervals of the entertainment, the more inti- 
mate chatter, that is the attractive feature. In some ways she 
could be compared to the chorus girl of the western stage only the 
after-theatre life of the latter is purely her private affair, whereas 
with the geisha it is the main part of her function as entertainer. 
The comparison it can be said is, from an artistic point of view, 
hardly fair to the geisha who is a product of a very high and 
specialized training which raises her to that plane where the sym- 
bolism in her art in dancing (posturing) and singing calls in full 
play a species of elaborate mental aesthetics — a feature certainly far 
from being connected with the chorus of the comic opera stage 
which appeals purely to the eye. In some features she forms what 
might be called the demi-mondaine of Japan, but here again one 
would never think of her in connection wath Sappho, ancient or 
modern. Charming and witty as she often is, it is more as child 
than as woman ; a plaything for idle hours, not a steel that can flash 
out brilliants when the occasion calls for it, and the tragedy so often 
thrown across Sappho's path rarely figures in that of the geisha. 
There is one ground on which she and her western sister of the 
night life of great cities meet. Both are equally looked down on 
and envied by the rest of their sex for their life, apparently one of 
gay careless freedom. Fashions in Paris first appear on the 
boulevards and geisha deeds and misdeeds are constantly on the 
tongue of Japanese women ; and any good Japanese woman would 
resent being taken for a geisha, although she would speak warmly 
of her beauty and her dancing. 

After all that a few gentlemen should meet for eating, drink- 
ing, and otherwise disporting themselves adds but little to the 
general life of a people. The brilliant night life of great European 
and American cities is not found in Japan. Matsuris or temple 
festivals, really fairs, are very small change compared to the pano- 
rama of cosmopolitan life that streams along the boulevards of 
Paris. For this the sexlessness of public life is responsible. Men 
have their clubs based on all sorts of objects, useful or otherwise, 
as are clubs in the West. Political clubs abound and, as politics 



44 SAKURAMBO 

are warm in Japan, new clubs are constantly in formation by a sort 
of fissile process. Scientific associations hold meetings on all sorts 
of subjects. The Japanese is by no means unclubbable. Quite 
the contrary. He does not seem to be able to get along without 
his kind. But women cutting no figure in man's public life, our 
general panorama of society is unknown. Now man (specific) is 
far more given to sensual pleasure than woman, and there is more 
particular application to him of the saying that " his god is his 
belly." It is no difficult matter to prove this, for the increasing 
influence of woman in social life has been accompanied by the 
retirement of the kitchen to the rear of the house. In the good old 
Saxon days, and long after, our ancestors used mainly to devote 
themselves to eating and drinking. Dinner began early and lasted 
pretty much all day. The great hall or dining room was the room 
of the house, and manners were such that woman generally had 
to disappear from the feast long before it got a good start. The 
wine came on with breakfast, and not in the more moderate allow- 
ance of our modern feasts. But with the gradual emergence of 
woman from her seclusion of the early feudal days, the dining 
room gradually loses its importance until in these present times the 
great hall has been replaced by the drawing room, and the dining 
room has been converted into as strictly special a use as a bed- 
room and has lost itg» position as the social centre of the household. 
Now if man makes a minor feature of social display — only 
relatively speaking for the high-sounding " titles " and " rituals," 
and the gold lace sprinkled over the trappings of some harmless 
creature whenever " the lodge " appears en masse and in public 
gives evidence that also in him the inclination for such display 
exists — it is the ne-plus-ultra of woman's life. Her public life is 
a competition of personal appearance with other women, and, as 
nature has given an unchangeable basis on which to work, this 
competition can only be equalized by the more or less skilful use 
that art, whether of costume or cosmetic, affords. That side of 
social life therefore of which woman is the commanding figure 
takes on the features of a stage setting in which the scenery is no 



BOSHU WAY 45 

inconsiderable part of the display. The frame must be adequate 
to the picture that is to be set in it. The broader her stage the 
better pleased she is, and it can be seen that the more related any 
purely social function is to display, the wider the influence of 
woman appears in it. Display being the main object, the relation 
between the individuals drops into mere formalities, the inanities 
of polite conversation in its general assemblies. It is intercourse 
of people who merely meet each other to make comparisons and not 
for any real object of vital interest to them. Not that these wider 
gatherings have not a deeper meaning. They have a much deeper 
meaning and in fact grow out of the gradual development of the 
individual in European society. The gradual appearance of 
woman from her feudal environment up to the present when she 
walks the earth free and untrammelled has g'one pari passu with the 
widening of the sphere of the individual until to-day man is left in 
free course to work out his life without interference from his fel- 
lows, provided he does not interfere with them. But as man is 
individually the freer, so he is more thrown back on himself and 
the more isolated he has become. Competition having become 
w^ider the wife has stepped out into the arena of life, and from being 
merely the regulator and guardian of the household she has be- 
come also an active ally in his struggle with the world. A man 
cannot in these days voluntarily reduce the effectiveness of his 
right arm, so to speak. Public life does not consist merely in 
doing so many hours' work a day at a fixed reward. It also means 
keeping in touch with his fellows as far as possible. Man is a 
gregarious animal, and it is through and by the herd that he works. 
As breadwinner he finds his hands full, and as breadwinner he finds 
that concentration on the object in view is essential to success. 
Effort cannot be scattered. Hence this regulating of the more 
formal intercourse has been left to the woman and has taken that 
form of development which her love of display demands. 

This outer form, the shell so to speak, is what is visible to the 
outside world. It is often the only part visible to many inside 
the charmed circle, but if so they are mere pawns in a game which 



46 SAKURAMBO 

has life's success for its object, and at times both stake and players 
are of the highest. It is the only field on which man can look 
over his future antagonist before he comes to grips with him, 
the ground set apart from the field of contest where no business 
and any business can be approached through the inanity of general 
formula, can be touched on lightly, cursorily, incidentally, and then 
be referred to the more serious m.oments, and all without that 
earnestness which necessarily must be attached to matters that 
men regard as of vital interest. The importance we attach to it is 
found in the stress we lay on " keeping up one's appearance in the 
world." And sharply does the world scrutinize its members for 
often this formal society is the only means of judging a man's 
capability to fit the standard he aspires to maintain. Not always 
a good means of judging, as the bankrupt list, moral and financial, 
shows of people who have kept up appearance to the final smash. 
However it is a means of judging more palpable instances of 
decline in worldly prosperity. From the Minister of State to the 
townsfolk " who hold a general amalgamation of themselves in the 
town hall," as Mr. Bantam, M.C., described it, this general field is 
their field of observation and man willingly lets the woman work 
her will in it, set its rules and manage its details. He has enough 
to do without more minutiae. This feature, I think, ordinarily 
escapes an easterner j^rought in contact with western society. To 
him it is often merely subserviency to women whose proper sphere 
is the home in his opinion and who figure very badly outside of it. 
To Japanese eyes the Bois parade and Rotten Row must be a great 
puzzle. The round of balls, receptions, theatre parties, where 
apparently to judge from the inmates of the boxes the play is the 
last thing thought of, all these features of western life are conces- 
sions to woman's whims that are foreign to his outlook. His life 
is largely bound by convention both in politics and in its social 
features where it touches the lives of other men. Not so the 
westerner. He largely stands alone. Associations of men by their 
very nature have a cut and dried object or else an intimacy too 
close to cover the exact field here sought. Neither the club nor 



BOSHU WAY 47 

the convention will cover it and so he has invented a new witenage- 
mote and left the framing of its rules to the other sex, while he 
uses it as a new instrument for his advancement and protection 
in this complex modern world. 

To the European the East has no social life at all. The man 
is alone or else figures at a set feast. His contact is at a few points 
with those interested in his particular life work or in the intimate 
relationship of personal friends. With societ)'-, as a whole, he has 
nothing to do. Indeed, if usage had not crystallized certain rules 
into an automatic feature of his daily life it is hard to see how 
his rulers would get in touch with him except by the aid of a police- 
man. The different small spheres in which men find themselves 
of course touch each other, the whole forming the body politic. 
Society therefore in the western acceptation of the term is a con- 
geries of such associations not- one homogeneous well-kneaded 
mass. Now I think Japanese politics bear this out. Intensely 
national they are intensely sectional. Indifferently this can be put 
down to the history of the race, or to the history of the race can be 
attributed their sectionalism. They are convertible terms. Japan 
of the past is usually described as a feudalism. A feudalism which 
in its modification so closely follows the history of feudalism in 
Europe that the parallel between the two is interesting. The 
feudal system in Europe, for instance, can be limited to that time 
during which the great lords, while owing their service and alle- 
g^iance to the king, were equally supreme in their own dominions 
over their own subjects. The breakdown of the system was 
gradual. In France it began with the reign of Louis XI and was 
completed under Louis XIV by Mazarin and Colbert. Under the 
latter king we find that his writ runs everywhere, and that when 
the local authority is in collision with it, this must yield at once by 
the ver}^ source of its issuance. Great lords there were with great 
powers in their hands, but before the king sitting in Parliament 
on a " Bed of Justice " the greatest of them was wax before the 
flame. Absolutism reigned supreme. '' I am the State," said 
Louis, who from the time he came to manhood had not even to 



48 SAKURAMBO 

juggle parliaments to make them yield. And so it lasted up to the 
reign of Louis XVI. Now something like this obtained in Japan 
from the time of Tokugawa lyeyasu. With the final crushing 
of the great daimyo there was no place in which the Tokugawa 
writ did not run and no place where the final decision sent down 
from Yedo did not command instant obedience. This was accom- 
plished in Japan in much the same way as in France by a judicious 
lopping off the heads that stuck above the crowd and by impover- 
ishing the nobility. But here Tokugawa centralization of feudal- 
ism stopped. They always continued to deal with the daimyo 
alone who were left absolute within their dominions. With the 
people at large they had no contact. 

As Richelieu found that Henry IV and his great minister had 
paved the way for him, so lyeyasu had his way made easier by 
Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, and when he died the kingdom passed 
to his grandson lyemitsu with very little to do except to keep things 
in the same condition. That he did not reach the same absolute 
position as Louis XIV is due to a complicating factor. If Rome 
and the Papal Court had formed part of Louis' dominions he too 
in all fulness could not have said " I am the State." There were 
two reasons why the Tokugawa court never reached the splendour 
of the French court. It always had a rival in the Court of Kyoto 
which, while of little importance from a political point of view, 
always maintained its ascendancy as the nominal fount of honours 
bestowed, and by its continued existence always kept alive the 
knowledge that there had been another power in the land. The 
Tokugawa system also deliberately maintained the clans. No 
matter how absolute that government its system was really based 
on a balancing of one daimyo or baron against his neighbours and 
elaborate rules restricting free passage from one district to another 
kept alive the local spirit. Instead of fusing the people into one 
homogeneous mass loyal to the government as such, the nation 
was made up of a series of clans whose loyalty was due to their 
chief and whose common head was still the shadowy priest Em- 
peror who had become to them almost a tradition. It is not difH- 



BOSHU WAY 49 

cult, however, to see that as the Tokugawa influence gradually 
waned through enervation — a course almost inevitable where for a 
long period the conditions were not such as to call for strong men 
— -the clans whose interests were directly opposite, the " outs " as 
opposed to the " ins," would simply await the favourable oppor- 
tunity to supplant them. The revival of the study of shinto or the 
national religion had directed the attention of the warlike class to 
the only feasible rallying point. Long experience of the advantage 
of a central power prevented any return to the clan system in its 
original heterogeneity of the fifteenth century' and the presence 
of the foreigners knocking for admittance also forbade any return 
to such a rope of sand. Satsuma and Choshii ousted Tokugawa in 
the name of the Emperor but the very fact ensured the moderniza- 
tion of the political system. This of course was not done at a jump, 
and dissatisfaction was so great that the Satsuma rebellion was an 
almost necessary consequence before the country could settle down 
under the centralized government which was foreign to the ideas 
of the people at large. This rebellion was due in part to reaction 
against such centralization which stripped the reactionary element 
of the last shadow of feudal power in their principalities, and in 
part to the absorption of the governing power by the progressive 
element which excluded such reactionaries from any share in the 
spoiling of the Tokugawa. 

Where difference between parties however is based not on 
some national policy but on supposed local interests or clan jeal- 
ousy, the rallying points are very numerous and the parties of the 
Japanese Diet are difficult to follow. Sometimes they seemed 
based on locality as North and South. Again one man of particu- 
lar abilities, and with a wish to impress some policy or system of 
economics on the national legislation, has his body of supporters 
who do not hesitate to bolt from the party caucus if their immediate 
leader thinks their principles violated. In other words, if parties 
are numerous, factions within parties are still more numerous, and 
the party lash by no means has the power that it has in England 
and particularly in America. This is to a large extent explained 

4 



50 SAKURAMBO 

by the nature of the franchise. The upper house is appointed 
by the Emperor. The lower house is elected on a very restricted 
property suffrage. When it is understood that in a large city like 
Yokohama, with nearly two hundred thousand people, barely five 
per cent, have any voice in the election of their own local govern- 
ment and not one-half of that have anything to do with the election 
of a member to the Diet, it can be understood that the Japanese 
Diet is not in any sense of the word a popular assembly. The 
people at large have one striking if somewhat strenuous method 
of showing their displeasure; assassination, which although very 
uncertain in its action, has in some cases a deterrent effect on push- 
ing through a measure which is absolutely repulsive to the public at 
large. The vindicator of the public rage is regarded as a hero, and 
though he may be hanged a dozen times over, his grave is kept green 
and his spirit appeased by the offerings of his admirers. These 
assassins make no effort to escape and usually carry a paper on 
their person setting forth their reason for their action in case they 
should be cut down by the officers. 

East and West therefore have approached this relation of the 
individual to the community from the same standpoint and have 
solved it differently, and the West far more completely. We 
remember the three Johns of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 
John, as John saw him, and very different from the real John; 
John as his neighbours saw him, very different from the first John 
and from the real John; John as his Maker sees him. Starting 
with the individual fettered John, the West has thrown the world 
open to him, until among the more advanced peoples John's John is 
given a fair field and stands free to use all his powers as best he 
may with all the tremendous fruition that they may bring him. 
The only limitation placed on him is that such powers be not 
used to the detriment of his neighbours. The result has been a 
fishing in strange waters, and to-day a remarkable feature in west- 
ern civilization is its fundamental homogeneity which is anything 
but related to its divers constituents, and due largely to the inherent 
self restraint of the race. In art and science this homogeneity has 



BOSHU WAY 51 

given rise to a cosmopolitanism anything but harmful in this age 
of iron. Herein East differs from West. To the East the indi- 
vidual, John's John, is not of the slightest importance. His de- 
velopment is to be carried out within certain narrow conventional 
lines. What conforms to the norm is good. What does not so 
conform is bad. This of course crushes out all originality. 
Whether any elasticity has been left in the human mind after cen- 
turies of such training remains yet to be seen, Man's only distinc- 
tion being that he is a thinking brute, imitation and adaptation 
are hardly the limiting qualities of any race. But the quality of 
originality needs exercise, like any other quality of the mind ; and 
it is only in the last forty years that Japan has somewhat length- 
ened the fetters of the individual John to give him freer move- 
ment; for this must not only be through legislation but through 
that far wider range governed by social convention. Private life — 
as our neighbour sees us — is as well sheltered West as East. The 
law of libel is finding extension, not diminution of its scope, among 
western nations. Some of the episodes however that find their 
way into the Japanese press would hardly find publication in the 
most reckless yellow journal, not it can be imagined through 
any particular delicacy but because of a damage suit. There is 
one point on which, the law of libel is very definite, and that is in 
relation to the government. Here punishment is severe and cer- 
tain, but otherwise great leniency is shown as if the object was to 
get the boys to tell on each other so that their paternal rulers can 
better keep an eye on them. 

The general social life of the West certainly seems healthier in 
many ways. It is always the case where some trust is shown in 
the individual. The essentials of family life are quite as much 
hidden and yet there is a fuller exchange of ideas and customs 
through the whole mass of the body politic on a more intimate 
basis than the relations of business and politics can afford. Men 
learn to know each other better the more points they touch at. 
Without entering in any way into the merits of including or ex- 
cluding woman from general society it is a fact that the extension 



52 SAKURAMBO 

of her sphere has been accompanied by a lessening of the spirit 
of provinciaHsm and clannishness, and their disappearance from 
the sphere of Japanese public life is to be regretted. That the 
life within the family of the West suffers from such liberality is 
much to be doubted. Filial duty is as. important to the West as to 
the East, although the West has long since stripped the father of 
his autocratic power in the household and refused to hold the 
grown man in tutelage. One would think from the way this 
question of filial devotion is often discussed that western sons 
were mainly occupied in turning their parents out of doors, or 
beating them, or otherwise maltreating them. We have few 
special laws on this subject, and where one of them is violated the 
perpetrator is quite as much an object of horror to the community 
as he would be to the East. We do not recognize the permanent 
tutelage of the son for that is incompatible with our system of 
individual liberty and liability granted as soon as man reaches 
what has been agreed on as man's estate. As only up to that time 
he has claim on his father for support, so all his life his father has 
claim for support on the son, and in the rare cases where the 
Courts have to intervene to enforce that right they have done so 
emphatically. The father of the West cannot enforce that unvary- 
ing obedience that the eastern parent accepts as his due. It is 
against our whole system of life. The western father must get 
his son ready to take his place in the world's battle on his own 
account, and hence conventional lines are made very broad and the 
boy is given much more opportunity to show his capabilities and 
how much originality is in him, to be developed for his future 
advancement. He does not want the boy to show himself equal to 
the average that he sees around him. He wants him to stand high 
in the world. The restraint is still there or should be there. It 
is well shown in a common saying, " give the boy plenty of rope." 
This can be done wisely or foolishly as is the case with all things 
human. In external deference to the aged an eastern household 
presents a very beautiful sight. Not more so I think than can be 
found in those older communities of Europe where parental author- 



- BOSHU WAY ■ 53 

ity has retained much of its earher flavour, which is the more 
worthy of note as in the West fihal respect is a part of rehgion 
whereas as in the East it is the whole of rehgion. Fihal mis- 
conduct in the West is a breach of religious law. In the East it is 
a dereliction against the Divinity itself and is regarded as sacrilege 
and punished accordingly, and there is no point on which the Jap- 
anese law is more minute and goes into greater detail as to the 
nature of the punishment than with crimes of this class. If filial 
misconduct is such a rarity in Japan they have piled up a very 
complete code in anticipation. An elaborate structure to act as a 
preventive which must have been based on intuition, for these laws 
are old laws and in existence long before Japan had contact with 
the demoralizing West. 

The Kimuraya is a delightful stopping place and Ho jo is 
noted for its view of Fuji rising up on the other side of the strait. 
My morning's ride would keep the mountain pretty constantly in 
sight. If the ride down the east coast of the peninsula had been a 
fine one there was a still more pleasant surprise in store. There 
are no late breakfast hours to bother one at Japanese inns. No 
sulky waiters to divide their attention between you and their slicking 
up for the day, a secret circumambient hostility because you take ad- 
vantage of God's daylight, disturb their routine, and start your day 
pretty much with the sun. Hence before seven all the preliminaries 
had been disposed of and my men w^ere ready for their freight. 
The first half of the day was on the plain or through the hills, the 
ride still keeping the pleasing type of the afternoon before, shady 
lanes and villages buried in trees. There were pretty views across 
the water to the Sagami peninsula and still more distant the blue 
outline of Izu. Ahead the mountains apparently barred the way 
to further progress in that direction, the most prominent being 
Nokogiriyama or " saAv-tooth mountain." a ridge so named from 
its regularly indented shape. At this point the road is approaching 
the turn which brings the western side of Tokyo bay into full view. 
The mountains here come close to the sea, sometimes leaving barely 
room for the road to pass, again cutting it off entirely. In such 



54 SAKURAMBO 

cases the only remedy is a tunnel, and of the thirty odd found 
between Katsuura and Minato two-thirds are on this section of 
the road, which runs along the sea not more than a dozen feet 
above the high water-mark. The previous night had been stormy 
and the waters of the bay were still in a great turmoil, dashing 
the spray over the edge. It was a fine ride on a good road with 
the cliffs towering far up overhead. There was comparatively 
little traffic. Rest sheds were conspicuous by their absence. It 
is to be suspected that these fine roadways have more to do with 
military purposes than with the immediate needs of the country 
district they traverse. Upper Boshu swarmed with soldiers, and 
they formed no little part of the wayfarers met on the road. In 
this part of the peninsula however I met with but one emblem of 
the powers that be in the shape of a policeman who was driving an 
offender to confinement. With his hands tied behind his back and 
attached to a cord some half a dozen feet in length the said offender 
was trotting along much as the unconscious pig goes to market. 
It goes against the American grain to see the genus homo treated 
in this degrading manner. It is a common enough sight in the 
country districts. In the treaty ports however the foreign system 
of a " Black Maria " is used to convey prisoners to and from a 
hearing, and the sight of two or three men trussed together like 
cattle, while seen at.times is not a very common occurrence. Just 
why such desperate measures are taken with the average Japanese 
criminal is hard to see, for once in the clutches of the law he 
becomes a very mild product and the sight of a uniform is enough 
to turn his gall to milk and reduce him to submission. There is a 
fair amount of savagery underlying the surface of the " Bete 
Hiimaine " and the Japanese have their full share of it, as is well 
shown in the encounters between the ordinary public and the law- 
breakers. One would think that where the individual counts for 
so little in the community that the derelict from the path of law 
would rush to extremes in his encounters with it, and the result 
would be a dangerous criminal as one outside the pale of the 
community altogether. That this is not the case is perhaps due to 



BOSHU WAY 55 

the lenity of the Japanese criminal law, which imposes less severe 
terms of imprisonment and has a graduated system of rebates, so 
to speak, according as the criminal gives less trouble in clearing 
up the offence. Hence a thief when captured not only gives a 
full account of his present transgression but often goes into full 
details of his past sins. This undoubtedly saves much trouble for 
the police if not for the public, against whom the offences are just 
as frequent. The specimen I had in front of me on this occasion — 
ci thief — and who doubtless fell on his knees and gave in at once 
when confronted by the man in authority, would not have hesitated 
to carve me into little bits with the short sword which is the 
favourite weapon of thieves, if I had caught him robbing my house. 
They are a class of offenders that get little sympathy from the 
public who are in great dread of them. 

The indentations of the coast were on more sweeping lines at 
this section of the way but on reaching Minato the road, here 
embowered in trees, turns into a little estuary, the locality being 
very picturesque. No Japanese town has any appearance of an- 
ticjuity, but simply of shabbiness. In fact, they are not ancient, for 
fires periodically wipe them out. Minato, however, on the whole 
looked quite new and shiny. A great deal of sake is brewed here 
and there is an excellent Japanese inn of the better class which 
fortunately I found open, for the place is a watering resort and out 
of season the inn ordinarily is closed. About a mile from Minato 
the main road is left for a cart track, which quickly degenerates 
into a trail leading up the outlying spurs of Kanozan, the loftiest 
part of the range as seen from Yokohama. It is not much of a 
climb and the view a beautiful one, Fuji rising in all its snowy 
splendour across the bay. Kanozan has an important temple on 
the summit, a plateau rather than summit, for the mountain is 
really a ridge. On the eastern side is a view over the cut up 
country to the east and south, locally called the " ninety-nine 
valleys." It is an exaggerated counterpart of the confused jumble 
that one finds on the Yokohama side. In fact this line of hills 
running across the base of Boshii and taking in the Sagami penin- 



56 SAKURAMBO 

sula makes a section of Tertiary clays which subsequently have 
been raised above sea level as an island when all the Tokyo plain 
was still under water. This peneplain has been carved into the 
most confused shapes — ramifications of valleys intersecting each 
other at every angle where the water courses have met the least 
resistance to their power of erosion. A condition of affairs not 
badly illustrated by the result of a watering pot on a good-sized 
mud pie. The inns are well placed, overlooking Tokyo Bay and 
with a full view of Fuji. The food was rather primitive but the 
people were very willing. Four miles of a picturesque walk down 
the mountain — picturescjue in a European sense, for the road just 
at the foot of Kanozan has but little Japanese in its surroundings — 
and kurunia can be obtained into Kisarazu, the main local port 
on the east side of Tokyo Bay. Here the welcome was cordial 
enough, but it was very necessary to make one's way good, for 
they were evidently uncertain about foreigners and there was some 
little delay before they would say they had accomrriodation for the 
night. However, being ensconced behind the shoji, by a judicious 
ignorance of the native tongue and a lesson in English to the scion 
of the house who had ambitions toward one of the Yokohama 
scliools, our nationality was proved, so to speak, and the guests* 
book was brought at once, not a usual thing, for ordinarily it is 
produced near the dinner hour in the evening when it seems more 
of a formality than a necessity. 

One of the first impressions that is the gift of the gods to the 
arriving stranger in Japan is the ease with which he picks up the 
language. It is merely a matter of vocabulary. There are no 
persons, genders, numbers, or inflections to be grasped with their 
involved combinations. The structure of the verb seems simplicity 
itself. There is something of a hitch in getting used to a post 
position instead of a preposition, but otherwise the sentence looks 
not unlike one of the Latin languages or German. Noun, object, 
verb. And so he rambles through the land, getting along tolerably 
well, and waxing pretty great in his own conceit over his linguistic 
accomplishments. If he does not stay too long in the land no harm 



BOSHU WAY 57 

has been done and the experience has all the freshening effect of 
any tonic that acts more on mind than on matter. It is when 
the period has been extended beyond a few months that he gets the 
full shock of the truth, and sooner if he wanders away ofif the 
beaten track where they not only do not understand him but do not 
care enough about foreigners to take the trouble to understand 
him. In other words, the time comes when he finds that the 
linguistic accomplishments have been mainly on the side of the 
native. In those parts of the country frequented by foreigners, 
the number of natives that are familiar with English construction 
of sentences is extraordinary. They may not know a word of 
English itself but they have grasped the foreigner's use of their 
own words, and it is this knowledge of theirs that enables him to 
make himself understood so readily in the large majority of cases. 
A native will address a foreigner in a way perfectly comprehensible 
'to the latter both in accent or in use of words and addressing one 
of his countrymen will become at once incomprehensible. He has 
adapted himself to the foreigner's needs, his first thought being to 
take the easiest method of being understood. Of course in turning 
to a Japanese he drops into the native idiom and use of words. If 
there is no royal road to learning there is certainly not even a 
" first aid " to Japanese. " Japanese at a glance " would be a mere 
vocabulary of words, for Japanese grammar could only and does 
only, to the foreigner, consist in a lengthy exposition of innumerable 
idioms. Every English construction undergoes not reversal but a 
sort of grammatical earthquake, shaking it into a tumbled heap of 
words which, as they stand, have no particular meaning whatever. 
Given a collection of a dozen words we can start in and build up 
a fair collection of sentences from them by altering the arrange- 
ment. This is very much the situation if a sentence be literally 
translated word for word from Japanese into English. It is often 
absolutely without meaning and we can suit our sweet will in 
making very much what we please of the combination. There 
must be a key, and fortunately this has been supplied by the very 
few who have penetrated the genius of this most difficult of eastern 



58 SAKURAMBO 

languages. Only with one of the excellent Japanese grammars 
written by foreigners and the aid of a Japanese teacher can the 
foreigner hope to make any impression on the native tongue. 
Unaided efforts are only too likely to end in the stumbling block 
of the native adaptability and the adoption of the lingua franca of 
the country. 

There is no question here of entering into a Japanese family 
(not readily possible for other reasons of a purely social char- 
acter) and surrounding oneself with the native medium, so to 
speak. The eye gives no aid, for to read the language one must 
first learn several thousand Chinese ideographs, must learn the 
endless readings of these ideographs as used by the Japanese in 
combinations and when standing alone, sometimes taking the 
Chinese sound or the Chinese sound as pronounced by the Jap- 
anese, and again appearing in the form of purest Japanese. And 
having grasped this, one must again go to school and learn a new 
grammar as applied to the written language in distinction from 
the language as spoken in daily intercourse. Very few foreigners 
can ever hope to grasp the etiquette of this tongue. For etiquette 
it has. From highest to lowest and vice versa the form of address 
is so different as in itself to explain the personal relations and does 
away with any but this indirect use of pronouns. This indirect- 
ness of address noj; only applies to the speaker and immediate 
hearers but defines the relationship of persons or objects the sub- 
ject of the conversation. Forms of official address, even to some 
extent found among western nations, are of course carried to a 
much greater extreme in a country where connection with govern- 
ment carries with it social position in itself, e. government that 
" hands down " its will to a people that " respectfully receives." 
In the upper circle of the Court a vocabulary and form of address 
is used entirely limited to its narrow membership. Among west- 
ern nations there has always been to some extent a formula for 
official addresses and receptions but limited to the occasion of its 
use. The East possesses its cut and dried set of formulas for 
such conditions and in addition has carried into general life a form 



BOSHU WAY 59 

of speech marking off class from class. Also throughout Japan 
can be found numerous dialects and in a still narrower sense what 
can be called patois, expressions without any literary sanction in 
form and often confined to the range of a single fishing or moun- 
tain village. There is perhaps here a distinction from the use of 
the term " dialect " as used in the West. The crystallized form of 
the written language (its Chinazation, analogous to the Latiniza- 
tion of our fifteenth century literature) prevents the development 
of a dialect literature such as exists in all European languages. 
But the divergence between Tokyo and Kyoto, north and south, is 
radical enough to form a dialect in the colloquial, and where it 
has been reduced to literary form represents a true literature. A 
Japanese can in general terms distinguish the particular habitat of 
his countrymen, just as an American can quickly tell the average 
" down-east Yankee," the Southerner, the man who lives in the 
Mississippi valley, and on the Pacific coast. As for patois it is not 
uncommon when travelling with a Japanese to find him stumped 
on occasions in some mountain hamlet by local idioms, although 
not more than a dozen miles away lies the large district town which 
limits itself only to some dialectical forms of expression. Another 
difficulty lies in pronunciation. Many foreigners living in Japan 
speak Japanese as their native tongue. They were born and 
brought up in the country. But there is a distinctive timbre about 
the Japanese voice that marks the native, and hearing without 
seeing the speaker, a foreigner usually betrays himself by the lack 
of this timbre. As to the foreigners wdio have grasped the genius 
of the language, who have a full and complete knowledge of its 
different ramifications, they can be numbered on one's fingers, and 
curiously enough are nearly all immigrants. Outside knowledge 
of Japanese, the grammar of the Japanese language has been given 
to the western world, not by those one would think most capable 
of doing the work, but by a set of scholars who have had to build 
the structure from the ground up ; to whom the language was an 
accomplishment not an accident of birth. 

It will not do however to think that Japanese has all the diffi- 



60 SAKURAMBO 

culties to itself. Our English tongue which has cut loose from 
most of the complexities of inflections, and reduced itself to the 
simplest form compatible with clearness, still has enough bristles 
left to make it a very tough morsel. We do not appreciate this 
until the occasion arises to prove our boast as to how easy English 
is as a language. " Just talk straight ahead." We have, in com- 
mon with most other European nations, an alphabet of twenty-six 
letters to express the sounds found in the language. That is, we 
fondly think so until examination shows that the number is nearer 
three hundred, a number corresponding to the forms of the Jap- 
anese hiragana syllabary. Taking small letters and capitals, writ- 
ten and printed, old script, black letter, and German script which 
is so often quoted as to be necessary to a student of English 
literature, this latter number can be reached without any difficulty, 
and italics and more fanciful forms common to our printers' fonts 
can be fairly added to swell the list. To us of course the relation- 
ship between these forms seems so evident that we say with 
perfect sincerity that the sounds of our alphabet are expressed by 
the twenty-six symbols; but to a Japanese, totally unfamiliar at 
the start with these symbols, this is not the case, and it is quite a 
shock in its way, after having impressed the printed symbol b on 
the neophyte to be asked what the form B represents, or B a 
form often used in heading chapters, and a host of other b's as the 
case may be. Monograms are often a puzzle to ourselves, as is 
also the ornamental script commonly used in seals. For words, 
English literature requires but a small glossary until we get 
behind the fifteenth century, but in that time there has been a 
wide range for change in orthography and printing, not only new 
words and new uses of words but new symbols. There are plenty 
of old books still living a hale existence in the libraries — some of 
us prefer these hardy old relics — not enough called for to reprint 
in our modern style and still showing their old dress of seventy 
years ago with fs for s's and final e's in places long since disused. 
Many still use the long / for .y in writing. 

Change of words with time, change of meaning and of spelling 



BOSHU WAY 61 

with time, are unavoidable difficulties for which the glossary is the 
only medicine, but our modern tongue offers plenty without going 
back to hunt for them. For instance homonyms. These are so 
superabundant in Japanese that it is the Chinese ideograph that 
makes the written language intelligible. The neophyte simply 
dipping his feet in the ocean of Japanese writing and printing 
quickly learns this fact and turns to the ideograph to read the 
kcna meaning printed beside it. In English, as compared with 
Japanese, such cases are rare, but still they exist in number 
enough to be troublesome. The context shows us at once the 
meaning to be taken but to anyone less familiar with the language 
they are a very serious stumbling block, especially the nearer they 
stand to being a keyword in the sentence. As with dear used in 
the sense of cost, dear as a term of affection, and deer an animal, 
this last named involving the long forgotten days of the dreaded 
spelling book. Spelling and the juvenile equivalent for swearing 
and vigorous switching were too common concomitants not so many 
years ago. The world has grown less strenuous to its progeny in 
these latter days, for less than twenty-five years ago in many of 
our schools we got a personal and practical application of the 
East in the shape of the bamboo cane. But all the verbal diffi- 
culties are slight compared to the pronunciation of English. Here 
even foreigners akin to our own race admit the difficulties piled 
up with almost every sentence they seek to use. The dictionary 
is a collection of words that in arbitrariness rivals the Chinese 
ideograph, for all our vowels have several sounds and no accents 
or indication to show which particular sound applies to the word 
under consideration; and diphthongs and triphthongs add their quota 
to the merry confusion of the fifteen different simple vowel sounds. 
For instance — receive, neighbour, height: pierce, piebald: mould, 
mound: my, myriad, myrrh: tub, tureen, true: father, fat, fair, 
afterzmrd: every, even: pine, pin: etc., etc. Then there is elision, 
slurring, and silent letters. Difficult as these vagaries of the alpha- 
bet are to other westerners, they however recall familiarities in 
their own languages that offers some aid in surmounting the 



62 SAKURAMBO 

peculiarities of English pronunciation, but to a Japanese using" 
a syllabary and not an alphabet these difficulties are enormously 
increased. It is really surprising therefore how widespread a 
knowledge of English is found in travelling through the country. 
Most of it is of a very haphazard character, a few words picked 
up by peasants who have lived on the sugar plantations of Hawaii 
or in the western states of America, or by " boys " who have been 
in service in the foreign settlements. There is a much better 
quality of English found among Japanese who have lived in 
England or in the United States, apart from the Japanese com- 
munities, and among Japanese of the educated classes it is spoken 
with remarkable accuracy of grammar if not accent. It is an occa- 
sional experience to meet with an English speaking Japanese who 
speaks without a trace of foreign accent, and these cases have 
been caught young, so to speak, and brought up abroad or under 
foreign influence. The general impression one gets however is, 
that as a nation the Japanese are no mean linguists. On asking 
the question^ most of them seem to think that the continental 
languages — French, German, Italian, and Spanish — are easier to 
learn than English. It is not the involved declensions that stagger 
them so much as pronunciation. The nebulous quality of the 
alphabet. Incidentally foreigners will often be found who say 
that they can understand the English as spoken by Americans 
more readily than when spoken by the English themselves. The 
former speak more in monotone; the latter accent words 
much more sharply, throwing the rest of the sentence in shadow. 
According to the Japanese, among foreigners there are a number 
that speak correct grammatical Japanese, and a great many who 
speak the language fluently with more or less correctness. They 
usually shake their heads as to its pronunciation. The general 
medium of exchange between native and foreigner is the " lingua 
franca " as it can be called, a Japanese with English syntax and 
sprinkled with Japanese idioms which will not stand transposition 
and must be learned by heart. 

In connection with language there is a subject that here pre- 



BOSHU WAY 63 

s€nts some very interesting features, and that is as to Japanese 
literature. It is difficult to believe that such a gulf exists between 
art and literature as on the surface appears to exist in this case. 
As to art, the West recognizes the high standing of the Japanese 
in most features and its supremacy in some. Western Catholicity 
cannot be better instanced than by the tribute it has spontaneously 
given to eastern art. In fact, it is the keynote of our western 
civilization to accept the good — or what it conceives to be the 
good — no matter where found. And such appreciation has a very 
wide range. There is less cant about this side of our character 
than any other. The beautiful features of the • intricate scroll* 
work carving such as is found among a truly savage race as the 
Maoris of New Zealand give rise to a genuine not a fictitious or 
curious pleasure. Only those who have access to it can state why 
Japanese literature has not been able to take its stand side by side 
with Japanese art. In these days the western world is going back 
of the race feature of any man's work. It is striving, so to speak, 
to find a formula to which everything mental, moral, and physical, 
is to be reduced. To find the ultimate natural basis on which 
phenomena of any character rest, and according as the particular 
instance conforms more or less closely to standard to judge it 
entirely apart from the factor of personal or national equation. 
Excluding subjects whose facts must ultimately rest on a purely 
scientific basis Japanese literature covers the whole gamut from the 
heaviest and hardest theology to the lightest novel. There are 
foreigners and Japanese well able, not only from command of 
language but from high literary qualifications, to translate the 
masterpieces of Japanese prose and poetry into the European 
languages. The instances of such translation are very scattered 
and strange to say have been mainly directed to that form which is 
the most difficult for foreigners to appreciate — the poetry, of which 
there are charming examples in English dress. A most difficult 
form of translation, for Japanese poetry is particularly a matter of 
form. There is one branch of it, the Hokku or Haika, almost 
built on a Chinese basis. It forms a sort of perpetual motion 



64 SAKURAMBO 

machine. It leaves the development of the thought in obscurity 
and enables a literature of commentaries without end to spring up 
over the dead bones, as in the controversy over " Bill Stumps, his 
mark." It must be confessed that in its original form the western 
mind cannot take much interest in such a production as the oft 
cited, 

" Asagao ni 
Tsurube torarete, 
- Morai-mizu ! " 

which Professor Chamberlain translates : " Having had my well- 
bucket taken away by the jonvolvuli — gift water ! " If the reader 
feels unable to solve the whole of the really beautiful idea con- 
cealed in these few words from his inner consciousness, he can 
find it in the Professor's paper on Basho in the Transactions of 
the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. XXX. Many examples are 
there elucidated. The question, however, rises in the mind of the 
foreign reader how much of these beautiful translations from the 
Japanese we really owe to the translation in developing the thought 
of the original. To us conundrums and acrostics and word puzzles 
have their place. But not as literature. Literature is complete- 
ness of thought and its expression in pleasing form according to 
more or less elastic canons of taste. The Literature of Power as 
De Quincey called it, as distinguished from the Literature of 
Knowledge, cannot depend on obscurity of meaning. 

Japanese poetry has literally been piled up by the ton but its 
appearance in foreign form is rather scanty. That of prose is 
still less. Essays, novels, folklore, memoirs, description of man- 
ners, dress and customs, all the little minutiae of Japanese life, 
abound; and the description of Japanese life and manners as seen 
through foreign eyes is complete and detailed, but very seldom 
has the native spoken for himself. Scattered fragments of Jour- 
nals, of Travels, and very scattered fragments of the " Hizaku- 
rige " (Shank's mare), by Jippensha Ikku, the Japanese Rabelais 
so called, are found in essays often devoted to general subjects. I 
suppose we are to be considered fortunate that the idea came into 



BOSHU WAY 65 

the head of Sir Thomas Urquhart and old Peter Motteux to trans- 
late the great French master for we have grown too nice in these 
latter days, or perhaps our fabric is a little more worn out and 
our modern Babylon cannot stand the push of coarser Nature. 
Much of Japanese literature is freely denounced as pornographic. 
All literatures are more or less so, and at times the greatest artists 
fairly wallow in the mire. In fact, man is many sided, and if 
" he strikes the stars with his lofty head " his feet on the contrary 
get in some very queer holes, but the one-sided man is not the 
whole man, and expurgated copies of our great authors are fit 
equipment for Sunday-schools and the use of children but not for 
libraries and grown men. It is safe to say that the indecencies of 
Rabelais, of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of Sterne, or of the Irish 
Dean, never made a lewd or immoral man ; which is far more 
than can be said of some of the modern analytical society novels 
and of the irretrievably vicious suggestive literature which is so 
prevalent to-day. To go through the world with one's eyes on 
heaven while desirable is no defence against the wicked who lay 
traps for one's feet. 

After all this question is one not only of an Age but of a 
Nation, and the term "pornographic " has a range as wide as 
nations. Judging by externals the most artistic peoples are the 
most human. Perhaps their very kinship to Nature makes her 
natural to them. Hence the Latin peoples will give a very dif- 
ferent interpretation to the term " pornographic " than the people 
of the North ; not that there is any difference intrinsically but it 
lies in the expression. The less clothes a man wears, the broader 
his smile. Now man is not any more moral for suppression. He 
is more hypocritical and it is no great boast to feel, as Taine says, 
that Pecksniff is thoroughly English even as Tartuffe is thoroughly 
French. If art and morality had any intrinsic connection then the 
western Anglo-Saxon who puts trousers on Apollo and denounces 
Longfellow's " Launching of the Ship " is the artist. But the 
world at large is hardly likely to admit any such conclusion, and 
statistics of the divorce court would hardly support the contention 

5 



66 SAKURAMBO 

of supra-morality. Now in saying that the translations from Jap- 
anese literature are limited, we are not confining the question to the 
narrower limits of what is acceptable to the more restricted taste 
of the Anglo-Saxon nations. The statement applies equally to 
all European languages. As Japanese art has been studied and 
lauded all through the West, so the field of Japanese literature has 
been as studiously neglected, which is the more remarkable if the 
catholicity of western taste be considered. There is not here the 
limitation of the eastern mind, for limitation it seems to be. 
Everything of practical value is eagerly accepted. Books of 
Science and of practical Philosophy, the range of the" Literature of 
Power " has been freely translated for the use of Japanese stu- 
dents; but with European art, poetry, and general literature, the 
Japanese has no touch. Here he is the true Oriental ; unchanged 
and unchanging within the circle of his own civilization and in that 
steadily revolving around the old centre laid down ages ago. 
With earth's eyes fastened on the deeds of his ancestors as his 
soul's eyes are fastened on the shades of those ancestors. The 
western standard is here far the safer to follow and by it we must 
judge that there has been found no Japanese Shakespeare or 
Moliere, no Dante or Milton or Goethe, no Boccaccio, Ariosto, 
Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Flau- 
bert, or George Sand, to paint Japanese life as these masters have 
painted English, Frefich, Italian, Spanish, and German life; no 
Montaigne to entertain with his garrulous geniality; and finally, 
no Rabelais to get us through this world of trouble, drowning its 
discords in an Homeric peal of laughter and teachings us, without 
cynicism, to make merry over its defects and make the best of its 
opportunities. 

At the time I speak of there was no direct service across the 
bay from Kisarazu to Yokohama. I had therefore to return to 
Tokyo. From distrust we had passed to the greatest affability, 
and the whole inn was present to say " sayonara " the next morn- 
ing. With a towel, a book, and some kivashi, and most important 
two large slabs of wood, I had quite an armful in addition to the 



BOSHU WAY 67 

luggage, and they took the trouble to get me off promptly for 
Kisarazu is a large place, the inn what we would call a commercial 
inn, and they had a houseful to get rid of that morning. The 
start was made by kiiruma, and after plunging through the lanes 
of the town we came out on the edge of the bay. Here there was 
no sign of boat or wharf or anything but water. Some distance 
out were lying a few sampans, and at least a quarter of a mile 
away was a tiny steamer. 

I expected some sort of a move on the part of the 
sampans, but instead my kvirumaya plunged boldly into the 
water, and started apparently for Yokohama direct. On we 
plunged slowly through the soft silt, and it was soon evident that 
he was making for one of the sampans anchored some hundred and 
fifty yards from the shore. Quite a little procession was now 
directing its way thitherward. A line of kurumas was following 
me, and by the " roadside " were pedestrians, men and women, their 
kimonos tucked up to the middle and carefully picking their way 
among the sea shells strewed along the bottom. On reaching the 
scow the water was nearly up to the floor of the kuruma. At this 
point one of the before-mentioned slabs of wood was consigned 
to the kiiruni:.ya, with " mo go sen," and he took himself off smil- 
ing. The other slab was destined for the boatman. The proces- 
sion followed on, the scow being gradually poled out as the tide 
went down, until we were quite a distance from the shore and per- 
ceptibly nearer the little steamer. 

This side of Tokyo Bay is very shallow near the land 
and a rise of a few inches covers no little amount of plane 
surface. The last shore was a long one and the late-comers 
reached us rather damp. After more than an hour spent at 
this elastic anchorage we were finally " complet " and pushed 
off for the ocean greyhound " Fukugawa Maru." One could 
not help thinking what would be the result if this trip is made 
in the reverse direction and the kurumas ran short or did not 
appear at Kisarazu. A foreigner would have to camp on the sam- 
pan until the kurumaya with his indefinite sense of time (of other 



68 SAKURAMBO 

people) came to his aid, or else take off his " breeks " and appear 
" au naturel." European undergarments are hardly of a model 
to meet such conting-encies. 

In somewhat less than three hours the steamer was to land 
us at the Ryogokubashi in Tokyo, a speed which, although by no 
means swift, was less exasperating than on a previous occasion, 
when coming from Shimoda, the " county town " of Izu, I had 
taken thirteen hours. Japanese coasting steamers are not a joy 
forever. After struggling through one of the side plates which is 
swung back, and denting one's hat and temper in the operation, a 
low cabin is entered bare of everything but matting and a narrow 
ladder which leads to a very small hatch and the deck. Most of 
these little steamers carry two boxes on deck, one of which at least 
is available for passengers. I advisedly say box for they are not 
more than 5x3 feet and little more than three feet high. Pas- 
sengers of course provide their own food if the length of the 
voyage calls for it. The hento or lunch box is an almost universal 
institution in Japan. The dining car is strictly an importation. 
The food in some cases explains the vital statistics of the Empire. 
Japanese fruit is not good under the most favourable circum- 
stances, the pear and the peach being the worst offenders. The 
pear is to be tabooed on all and every occasion. Either the name 
or the fruit is a hidequs caricature. The peach is sometimes fairly 
good — for a Japanese peach — ^but as the native often eats it, is an 
atrocity. On the occasion to which I refer, coming from Shimoda, 
one of my fellow passengers brought on a bundle of the native 
peaches for his amusement and sustenance. As one rolled out at 
my feet it gave me an opportunity to inspect it when returning it 
to him. It was absolutely green and hard. Eight of these he 
consumed between Shimoda and Tokyo, and perhaps more at times 
when not under observation. He knew nothing of the affecting 
mishap to " Johnny Jones and his sister Sue, them two " which was 
just as well for his peace of mind. Slipping close by the old 
Shimbashi forts the Fukugawa Maru entered the Sumida River 
and soon put us on shore at the slip near the bridge. I had re- 



BOSHU WAY 69 

turned m good time for the azalea blossoms at Okiibo — a suburb of 
Tokyo — and it was night before I once more reached my head- 
quarters. During my absence I had had a visitor in the shape of 
the dorobo or thief, and he had been regulating the distribution 
of the goods of this world on his own socialistic principles and with 
small regard to the wishes of the normal owner. The fact is 
worth mentioning in connection with a curious superstition of this 
facetious fraternity. They believe that if they befoul the place 
selected for their exploit and cover it over with a tub the people 
of the house will be held fast by the god of sleep. Hence the 
visits of such gentry call up an amount of wrath that would give 
spice to the interview if they were caught at the time. Japanese 
housekeepers are careful not to leave any of their tarai or tubs 
lying around so as not to offer any facilities for the performance 
of this curious rite, although it is 'much to be doubted if any thief 
is really deterred by his inability to carry it out with all its 
formalities. 



Ill 



IWASHIRO WAY 



" Cerchiamo la bonta, la virtu, I'entusiasmo, la passione che riempira 
la nostra anima, la fede che calmera le nostra inquietudine, I'idea 
che difenderemo con tutto il nostro coraggio I'opera a cui ci votere- 
mo, la causa per cui moriremo con gioia." — Romansi delta Rosa. 

Anyone who comes to Japan to surround himself with an- 
tiquity is doomed to grievous disappointment. If there is a coun- 
try that has the stamp of external newness on it is " the Central 
land of Reed Plains." Not that there are lacking hoary monu- 
ments of antiquity, such as the temples at Nara, at Kamakura, the 
various Daibutsu, and even such evidences of a more remote past 
as dolmens. Ancient monuments are to be found to some extent, 
but they are lost in an oasis of wooden houses which have no mark 
of age on them but shabbiness. Much of Japanese antiquity as 
you see it is a gross fraud. Stones in the cemeteries take on a 
mouldy and moss-grown appearance in the lapse of twenty-five 
years. A new house or temple in a half a dozen years looks as 
weather-beaten as if it had stood there for a century. Places are 
indeed ancient and place names in some cases figure in the earliest 
of their chronicles dating from the eighth century, but nothing is 
left but the names. The present is its heir. The reason for this 
is fire. Even if structures for secular use, built of wood, could 
have stood the test of time, this element would probably have wiped 
them out, so widespread being its range that the average life of a 
house in Tokyo is put at less than a dozen years. Although there 
is plenty of building stone they make but little use of it, the usual 
explanation being the prevalence of earthquakes. It is noticeable 
however that such structures as were built of stone — Nagoya 
Castle for instance — admirably withstood the great Gifu earth- 
quake and no material damage has ever been reported to foreign 
built houses. The Japanese are losing their timidity in this 

70 



IWASHIRO WAY 71 

respect, brick coming into use ; and, as in a number of other direc- 
tions, what was needed being the initiative from the outside to 
show them the way. It is only fair to say that a twenty-two 
storied " skyscraper '" would never become popular in the country, 
either as an investment or as a neighbour. Now the lack of 
antiquity in Japanese colour is very much the reverse of Europe 
where age impresses itself " en bloc." With all due respect it is 
quite feasible to find in Christian Rome monuments outdating 
the temples of Nara by centuries. But in addition whole districts 
have a hoary life. The Italian and Spanish Ghettos, the Latin 
quarter of Paris, have no counterparts in Japan. An old Spanish 
city like Toledo fairly shows the old bones from which it has been 
constructed and a Moorish palace, perhaps later the Hall of the 
Templars, will still house a multitude unconscious of the pas<- 
frowning down on them from some capital, or arch, or groining. 

There is a touch of fellowship in the homage both East and 
West pays to the places associated with its great minds. In these 
present times the wave of such feeling is in full force, and if a few 
years earlier it might have spared the old Tabard Inn of South- 
wark to stand as a national monument. Such work must spring 
from the heart of the people. Official support is too likely to take 
into consideration the politics not the merits of the candidate to 
such honour. There is one feature of Japanese literary life that 
fosters this preservation of detail of the lives of some of their 
literary men. Every literary man of eminence had his disciples 
and it is their reverence that has preserved all the little details 
of the master's life. But it must be understood that their system 
did not favour originality. A man's work must be based on a 
certain classical norm, without interest in itself as an instance of 
evolution. As it conformed to the norm it was a thing of beauty, 
as it lapsed it was to be regretted and cast into outer darkness. 
A teacher's life, thus surrounded by these watchful disciples, was a 
continual illustration of his doctrines. As a rule they practised 
what they preached. But as they subordinated themselves to a 
formula, so they lost much in personality. They are rarely off 



72 SAKURAMBO 

guard ; usually on exhibition. Such an occasional irregular char- 
acter as Jippensha or Hokusai gives a sense of relief. The Jap- 
anese are not so tender to some other symbols of the past. At 
the fall of the Shogunate the land was dotted with the castles of 
the daimyo. These were all given up and passed into the hands of 
the government. Against modern artillery the great majority 
were worthless hulks, more dangerous to those taking shelter in 
■them than to any assailant. Just why these picturesque remnants 
of a bygone age should be wiped off the surface of the earth is 
hard to see; and yet they were, and so effectually that one can 
travel through the land without seeing a sign of them. Occasion- 
ally a bit of stone wall perched on a slope outside a village, and 
which by a suspicious sweeping line on the corner recalls some 
old Japanese print, and shows where only forty years ago such a 
structure represented the governing power in the land. Now 
antiquity in the abstract is just as pleasing as antiquity in the 
concrete. I do not know but that the intervals spent in rambling 
through the old quarters of Italian, French, German, and English 
towns, without any particular archaeological lion in view, are the 
pleasantest features of travelling. They are the idle moments of 
sightseeing. When we are viewing some particular spot — house 
or place — where an important event of history took place, the 
mind is or ought to be more or less on strain. We are at school, 
so to speak, for the time being. But when the attention is not so 
concentrated; when we are simply placed in such a medium, as 
for instance, the ancient canals of Venice, or a row of the square- 
timbered houses of Shrewsbury, or a sixteenth century corner hid- 
den away in the ecclesiastical quarter of Rouen; then the very 
diffusion of our attention, its scattered range, removes all element 
of strain and leaves behind simply pleasurable interest. It is the 
difference between the burning lens and the prism. The Tower of 
London and Westminster Abbey are of overpowering interest, and 
at them we go guide-book in hand for the good of our minds and 
souls. The old inn at Ludlow — the Feathers — arouses a much 
milder interest. We need no guide-book and concentrate our 



IWASHIRO WAY 73 

attention on chops, potatoes, and a tankard of ale, and find the time 
passes anything but slowly in recalling the old and varied life of 
the inn in the days of yore, the pleasant and profitable picture of 
the life of the past that it has seen. 

Although his journey to the North may take the traveller half 
way across the city of Tokyo — which has been a great city since 
the seventeenth century — he meets with no such interest on the 
way. Only one-quarter of the town, the surroundings of the Im- 
perial palace, presents exceptional features. The rest is simply an 
enlargement of a score of a number of minor towns. A few 
foreign style shops in the Ginza make some display, for the 
rest, miles of one-story wooden houses monotonously alike. If the 
district is a business one, the front is a shop. Otherwise latticed 
windows and in front of the large majority a screen or half-screen 
of fencing to protect the houses from the more immediate inspec- 
tion of the passing public. In the wealthier residence quarter high 
fences and more or less elaborate gates, and within, some trees the 
tops of which appear behind the fence. The house behind all this 
may be old. It may have escaped the ravages of time and fire, 
but the probability is that it has not passed its quarter of a century 
and in all events architecturally would resemble its neighbours. 
This is the usual panorama seen by foreign eyes, for the shortest 
route from the Shimbashi station to Uyeno — the station of the 
Northern Railway — leads through narrow streets to the left of the 
Ginza. Streets given over to special trades where one block will 
be a waving front of kimono stuffs displayed to would-be pur- 
chasers, and the next block a choice collection of old metal of all 
kinds from a second-hand hib.xhi to a second-hand anchor for a 
junk. There is one thing to be noticed about the streets them- 
selves, and that is the fairly good condition in which they are kept. 
They may be ankle deep in mud, but the only obstructions tolerated 
are the repairs made by the municipality itself — perhaps cutting off 
part or the whole of a street from public travel or coating it with a 
layer of rough stone. This is a feature of no little importance 
where many of the people go barefoot or at best with straw sandals 



74 SAKURAMBO 

on their feet. Broken glass, fragments of tin cans or other sharp 
objects would be very serious under such conditions, but one does 
not often hear of accidents of this character. The ''ricksha " men 
run ahead through the darkness without much care to footing. 
I remember once in crossing the city at night one of my runners 
stubbed his toe rather severely against a manhole which had been 
set so as to project above the road level, and there was no little 
excitement over it. It is the only time I have seen them show 
front to a policeman, and he regarded the fact of some importance, 
for a note was at once made of the occurrence and presumably 
somebody was hauled over the coals for carelessness. 

The approach to Uyeno is along one of the best stretches of 
highway in Tokyo; a broad avenue nearly a mile in length and 
with a pavement for foot passengers. The Japanese, however, has 
as yet not taken up the question of tree-planting in the cities, and 
from side to side it is as bare as a board, except in so far as electric 
poles and rails for the cars break its surface. The station itself is 
an anticlimax. Most Japanese stations are. Bare, shabby wait- 
ing rooms and a travelling public with manners quite as bad as 
they are in any other part of the world. Otherwise the construc- 
tion is excellent. The platforms are all raised so that one enters 
the cars on the same level. They are all faced with stone and 
macadamized, and ^the larger stations are sheltered from the 
weather throughout the platform. Overhead bridges connect the 
different platforms and only travellers are allowed access to them 
or those holding platform tickets. The speed on Japanese rail- 
ways is intolerably slow, twenty to twenty-five miles an hour for 
the average express service. This is largely due to the fact that 
most of the roads are single-tracked, and the trains take root on 
switches until one thinks the operation of the road has come to a 
sudden and untimely end. The roads are protected by an ample 
signal service and the engineer carries his right of way with him, 
so to speak, in the shape of a little baton which is given up at the 
next block. The Japanese boast that they never have an accident 
— not strictly true — and there is no particular reason to dread one, 



IWASHIRO WAY 75 

for it does not seem feasible that there should be any great crash if 
two trains should happen to dispute the right of way. The Sanyo 
railway in the South has the best service, and the government road 
— the Tokaido — has the worst. On their Maebashi line the North- 
ern railway have some cars of improved American pattern, and 
their weight and strength are palpably evident in smoother run- 
ning. In some ways the Japanese newspaper man is much re- 
stricted in his legitimate field of operations, and some of our scare 
headlines would be treasure trove as journalistic timber, substitute 
for the gay doings of the geisha. " A terrible crash," " The flyer 
telescopes the dynamite local at sixty miles an hour," " Amos 
Quito one of the victims," etc., etc., have not yet been imported. 
The Oriental is supposed to be far more careless as to his life than 
the Occidental, but I think in some ways the statement has its 
limits. He is one of the best drilled creatures in the world. Im- 
plicit obedience to his superiors is one of his qualities, and when 
sent on a mission involving death itself he will carry that mission 
out to the best of his ability and with great indifference to the 
result personally. But he takes it for granted that what can be 
done has been done to obviate the dangers attendant. No mis- 
take has been made, and if he comes to grief it is so written down 
in the fates. East, as in West, there is not indifference to useless 
sacrifice of life. He. makes one of the best soldiers in the world 
simply on this ground, that his individuality has been merged into 
the ground mass of the operating body. He is an instrument and 
has abdicated his own personality, so to speak. His body is there 
but his mind is *' possessed " by his superior officer just as it is 
" possessed " by one of his Shinto gods. 

Now this is a very good quality and a very formidable one — 
found elsewhere it can be added — but carried to an extreme in the 
Asiatic. It is the spirit that has animated Asia from the dawn of 
history, and it is the direct opposite of the great pioneer nations 
which foster individualism. With them the individual has scat- 
tered himself over the world, g^etting a foothold, subduing the 
savage tribes, developing the country and, most important, develop- 



76 SAKURAMBO 

ing himself with it, until the first thing the world has known is that 
from a few scattered energetic men, with little support but their 
own right arms, a great colony and a great nation has sprung into 
life. The government-ridden man has never done this as yet. In 
the first place the government decides whether there shall be any 
going at all. This is the first blow to his self-reliance. In the 
second place, it says where he shall go, and lays down endless 
minute rules as to what he shall do when he gets there and how 
he shall do it. On new soil broad lines are the only guide, and the 
minutiae are so much rubbish from the official brain which clog 
the wheels of progress. They rarely fit the new conditions, and 
simply deal a second blow in stripping the settler of so much more 
of his remaining stock of self-reliance. What is left is not worth 
having; a gang of labourers who have simply changed their habi- 
tat not their condition, themselves looking to their government 
to smooth over every difficulty for them, and their government 
regarding them as another source from and by which to satisfy 
placeholders. The nations of the world all started fairly even. 
Asia had as good a chance as Europe to people the world, but the 
Asiatic system was against it and they hug their chains to this 
day. Continental Europe to some extent makes the same mistake, 
but on a much less complete scale. Only the Anglo-Saxon has 
set the individual free, giving play to his freest efiforts and to-da}- 
ruling half the world. Continental colonies are languishing the 
world over. America, North and South, is the goal of the Con- 
tinental European who is worth having, the man who has energy 
enough to try and better his condition in preference to tamely going 
to the wall at home. And America is getting them simply because 
these men see their failure at home and do not see why they should 
succeed under the same conditions abroad, whereas they see their 
fellows succeed on the other side of the Atlantic. The Japanese is 
far too much of an Asiatic to feel the charm of individual freedom. 
He is content with all the government he can get, to have his down- 
sittings and his uprisings regulated for him, much as one bobs a 
sparrow on the tail to make him drink ; but it is getting hard to 



IWASHIRO WAY 77 

find a living at home and hence he emigrates in bands. They 
may come in as individuals, but invariably drift into their local 
communities. As the object is simply to make a living, and not to 
form part and parcel with their hosts, they take no interest in their 
temporary home except as its laws may press on their prejudices 
or the local interest of the Japanese community. As individuals 
they deal with their own community and their community, as a 
settlement outside the local authority, deals with that authority. 
Colonization by government order perhaps can be successfully car- 
ried out close at hand, and there seems to be a future for the Jap- 
anese is northeastern Asia. Whether under that system they are 
going to become competitors as a world power remains to be seen 
and much to be doubted. Colonies must be planted with the even- 
tuality of becoming self-supporting and self-seeking, but as the 
Mussulman, the world over, turns his face to Mecca as the sun 
rises and sets, so the Japanese for ages has turned, and for ages 
perhaps will turn, his face to the throne of the Mikado. Western 
individualism always has defeated the centralism of Asia. Be- 
tween the man who carves the most exquisite netsuke or weaves 
the finest silk, and the man who first detected radium emanations, 
there is a great gulf fixed, and granted the same conditions the 
same result will follow. Asia must not only adopt the spirit of 
western material progress, but must prepare to adopt the means 
to keep that spirit alive. 

If one looks at a geological map of the main island of the 
Empire, there can be seen a white splotch shaped something like 
a polypus with the body at the head of Tokyo Bay and extending 
arms in dififerent directions. This is the Tokyo plain pushing 
as far south as Odawara and the Hakone Mountains, running other 
branches up to and into the main mountain mass to the west, and 
north to Sendai, with an offshoot to the upper part of Kazusa. 
It has not been many ages since it was all under water and in the 
main is level. A range of low hills stretches across country at 
the head of the bay from the Tonegawa River to the Tsurumigawa 
at Kawasaki, and the more elevated part of Tokyo has been built 



78 SAKURAMBO 

on these hills. Half an hour however to the north takes me out of 
the little valleys and on to the main plain, which extends a sea of 
rice-fields in every direction. This is pleasantly broken by groves 
of trees, sometimes mere clumps of half a dozen or less around a 
shrine, and by the villages dotted over the plain. The whole land 
is under the most complete cultivation, and as we roll over miles of 
this plain it is not hard to see why the lord of Yedo obtained and 
held such a dominating position in the political development of 
Japan. Nearing Utsunomiya the Nikko Mountains appear to the 
left and ahead on the right the outlyers of the Coast Range, which 
takes a much greater development farther north. The stations 
mostly have names familiar enough in English dress, Akahane, 
" Red Wing," Oyama, " Little Mountain," Kurihashi, " Chestnut 
Bridge," Shirakazva, " Level River." At the more important 
stations men parade the platforms with trays of little boxes, sold in 
pairs, one containing rice, the other a slice of omelet, some smoked 
fish or stewed meat, bamboo root and relish. Beer, at some places 
" sandoyeach " (which is close enough to sandwich), all sorts of 
kwashi or cakes, and soft drinks. This business is in the hands of 
the neighbouring teahouses, and no matter how one may differ 
as to the edibility of the contents of the boxes the surroundings are 
usually neat and clean. The stations differ — to Japanese eyes 
anyhow — in their makeup of these boxes, and by following the 
example of our native neighbour we can do better. As the place 
that enjoys the culinary reputation is reached, heads go out in 
every direction and the bento man is enshrined on the pedestal; 
whereas elsewhere tobacco, newspapers, etc., have the call. Most 
of the foreign passengers leave the train at Utsunomiya, which is 
the junction for Nikko. This was but half of my present day's 
journey. The boy brought on a fresh tea supply — a little stand 
fitted with pot and saucers supplied by the railway company — 
the blue mountains unrolled in a continuous line in the West, a 
volcanic cone here and there jutting out of the mountain wall, and 
the same scene of rice-plains and valleys unfolded itself, but here 
interspersed with barren spots, sandy, and on which only stunted 



IWASHIRO WAY 79 

pines were growing. At Koriyama, " Herd Mountain," it was my 
turn to leave the train and take the branch Hue which runs into the 
mountains and is extended as far as Wakamatsu in Iwashiro. It 
was evening when we entered the fine gorge of the Gohyakugawa, 
the mountains rising high on both sides. My destination was Ina- 
washiro, a httle mountain village at the foot of Bandaisan, which 
volcano soon appeared on the right raising his head to a height 
that in the gloaming looked unpleasantly excessive. It was quite 
dark when I reached the little platform station, to find that as 
usually happens in Japan the connection between station and 
town was rather theoretical, or perhaps the railway had been built 
with a liberal eye to the future growth of the place. This was 
nearly a mile off, and over a road recently coated with shingle which 
I considered very bad walking, although later I revised my views 
and could conceive of something worse. In the darkness it was 
most picturesque. The great mountain loomed up directly in front 
towering over the little village, the outskirts were farms hidden 
behind hedges of bamboo in the darkness and taking a familiar 
home look. The town itself thus gradually entered on was a mere 
mountain village with no pretence to anything but its agricultural 
affairs. The night was a hot night in early August and people 
were lounging up and down, the houses wide open from front to 
back, and everybody was, so to speak, metaphorically if not literally 
out of doors. The inn was no exception to the rule, and was built 
more on the lines of one of the farm houses than with the formality 
of the town inns. The gossips were mainly collected in the front 
apartment which also answered for kitchen, and Ojisan made but 
little show of his books and writing pad and nesans and the other 
paraphernalia displayed in what corresponds in the Japanese ya- 
doya to the " office " of our western hotels. I was quite habitu- 
ated to the conditions of the Japanese bath, but I must say it was 
the first experience of entering it so " coram publico " as in this 
particular case. The general lavatory appliances for washing 
everything from one's person to the dishes were jumbled together 
in the front of the establishment. In mountain districts I had 



80 SAKURAMBO 

often seen people — men, women, and children — tubbing in front 
of the houses for the very good reason that the house was too small 
to conveniently arrange a place for the bath other than the high- 
way. I had now an opportunity to put this experience to use. 
The tub, a converted beer barrel, was placed in the front of the 
yadoya and open to the public, although withdrawn some dozen 
feet back from the house front. In this real Japan we have some- 
thing of the times of the garden of Eden, minus fig-leaves or 
before that unseemly episode. Undressing to that condition 
known to the Scotch as a " mother naked man," handing the 
garments over to nesan (elder sister), in turn we stepped in- to be 
boiled like a lobster for as long as desired. Nesan washed her 
lacquerware, Obasan (honourable grandam) cooked the supper, 
I bathed, we were all girls together, and the passing public lacked 
the curiosity to gaze. 

Now this brings up the question of modesty as it is under- 
stood East and West. Or rather as it is misunderstood, for there 
is much reason to believe that we are tilting at the two sides of the 
same shield. And to both sides its contrast presents features that 
shocks every sense of what they understand to be modesty. The 
South Sea islander, who would send his spouse to the tent of his 
brand-new white friend, would have been highly scandalized at any 
appearance of womep in general association with men and in public 
life. The women have their own side at public festivities, as much 
so as in any Quaker meeting house of the old days, and generally 
from the external relations with the other sex women could be 
said to be most carefully looked after as respects the exposure of 
their persons. If external respect has any relation to modesty 
then the Mohammedan should be held to be the most considerate 
to his womenkind, for he veils them from head to foot in such way 
as to prevent even an outline of the form appearing. But the 
very reverse is the case, for they perhaps hold women lower than 
among any other nation, not even granting them a soul. The 
question therefore of exposure of the person as related to modesty 
is a purely relative one, and, to tell the truth, is simply related 



IWASHIRO WAY 81 

to mental condition and is governed largely by climate. The 
standard of correctness is a purely national one, and where evil is 
not thought there is no evil, until the serpent enters the garden 
of paradise and whispers the thought about. One cannot even 
grant that external modesty is properly a question of morals. 
There is a larger percentage of illegitimate births among the 
nations of northern Europe than among the nations of the South, 
the prevalent form of religion undoubtedly being the controlling 
factor. It is only necessary to contrast the two neighbouring coun- 
tries of Scotland and Ireland to have an instance. Exposure of 
the person plainly has nothing to do with these cases. In fact 
exposure of the person is more of an antidote to pruriency than an 
incitement. Artists who deal with the nude are by no means 
immoral people, and in fact, if we can judge by divorce court 
records they figure very favourably. In fact, sexual immorality 
is a question not of clothes at all but of social standard. Questions 
of property and succession visit the offence on the woman in such 
cases in a social sense, and social damnation, the auricular confes- 
sion, and fear of Hell in people of lively religious faith, have more 
preventive effect than any innate feeling as to exposure of the 
person. In western communities our ideas of modesty are some- 
what contradictory. Every effort is made to develop and beautify 
the lines of the female figure and the whole dressmaker's art is 
■directed to such display. A woman is perfectly modest who i? 
almost naked to the waist and yet must not show an inch of ankle. 
Now this is an acquired feeling, for any young girl who appears in 
Tier first low neck dress feels — and ought to feel under our train- 
ing — a shock to her modesty. It quickly becomes customary and 
such exposure is regarded as perfectly natural. In the West also 
we associate acts of necessity with our animal nature and carefully 
seclude such features in public life. This is highly proper on the 
ground of the offence such necessities give to our whole aesthetic 
sense. The range of such seclusion however is very wide, and 
■certainly is not to be carried to the ridiculous excess as in certain 
American cities, where public latrines are not supplied at all or in 
6 



82 SAKURAMBO 

such minor numbers as to be of little practical use ; namely, only in 
certain public buildings in which business may keep men for some 
large portion of the day. 

There is no doubt that in the West, according to our varying 
standard, we act wisely. We have forcibly connected clothes and 
modesty, but it is a case of the whited sepulchre and on the point 
of pruriency the West cannot claim any cleaner record than the 
East. Pruriency is common enough in the East, and the eastern 
mind is no cleaner than the western mind. In one respect, in his 
lower view of woman he is distinctly worse, as shown by the 
snatches of remarks cast by coolies when women pass, and which 
rouse the protests of their own newspapers. He has the advantage 
that a number of minor necessities, which we absurdly call animal 
forgetting that we ourselves are animals, do not arouse in him 
other opportunities for its exercise. The Japanese woman is just 
as modest as her western sister, if directed in somewhat different 
channels. To her the exposure of the low neck dress is of the 
grossest immodesty and she would never dream of exposing her 
breast in that manner just as she would not hesitate to suckle her 
child in public; in which connection it can be added that among 
the upper classes of Japanese, wet nurses are commonly employed. 
She would not hesitate to retire for purposes of necessity. Here 
we in the West hav§ carried modesty to an absurd excess, for all 
sorts of excuses are resorted to by men to obtain a few minutes 
intermission at the theatre, and many a woman has suffered physi- 
cal injury because the train crew have made up the train so that 
the woman's lavatory is placed at the upper end of the car. Cus- 
tom has been much modified in Japan simply because the idea of 
evil has entered — which by the way shows how much custom has to 
do with the question. To the Japanese woman the' bath is a neces- 
sity and she does not hesitate to visit the public bath; or rather 
did not hesitate, for this practice is now only found in the country 
districts retired from the view of foreigners. Once more the 
'' idea " has entered and hence the Japanese have taken measures 
to guard against its evil influence. 



IWASHIRO WAY 83 

Bandaisan had not grown appreciably smaller with daylight. 
Standing at Inawashiro at an elevation of 2000 feet, the top of the 
mountain was some 4000 feet above us, and the uncertain factor 
was just how much of that ascent was necessary to secure my 
object, a matter of no little consideration on a hot August day. 
Part of the way anyhow was to be done on horseback, and two 
steeds, by no means fiery, were waiting me at the inn front. Jap- 
anese cattle seem to come under the national influence, so to speak, 
and have the same respect for the police regulations as the native 
himself. The stallion and the bull are seen performing their func- 
tions as draft animals in every direction. The Japanese horse is 
an overworked Cjuiet little beast. They have a nasty trick of biting, 
which requires as much caution in passing them by the head as the 
average mule by the heels. I and my " boy," climbing up on our 
Japanese saddles, were started off led by two natives in raincoats 
and mushroom hats of vast size. Altogether the sight was edify- 
ing and called to my mind in some ways Hogarth's painting of the 
Knight and Ralph in Hudibras. We were taking a base advan- 
tage of Bandaisan by attacking him in the rear, and passed out of 
the village along the base of the mountain paralleling the railway 
running nearly a mile away. Gradually rising up the slope a beau- 
tiful view unfolded itself. Japan is made up of mountain and 
valley scenery of every kind, but I can recall but one other instance 
that gives the exact sense of isolation that is found in' this Waka- 
matsu plain ; the sense of unity in itself. The steep narrow valleys 
so often seen seem part of a system, the ranges piling up and 
obviously forming links in a more or less extensive chain. So 
many twists and turns and we are again in the world of men. 
But here we are in the bottom of a bowl. The plain is wide 
enough to give a sense of completeness to the scene. The villages 
sprinkled over its surface make a little world in themselves, but this 
plain is surrounded by a wall of mountains except at the corner 
where the Gohyakugawa, flowing from lake Inawashiro, breaks 
through the gorges. Even here the mountains so fold and overlap 
each other as to hide entrance and exit. The plain seems abso- 



84 SAKURAMBO 

lutely cut off from the outside, the only apparent exit being- over 
the lofty and precipitous wall of mountains. Lake Inawashiro 
itself is a product of Bandaisan, filling a depression the result of 
an eruption of the volcano. It teems with fish, but the sides being 
meadow flats and not wooded, it presents but few attractive fea- 
tures. Not far from its head lies the large city of Wakamatsu, 
not in contact with the lake as would be thought desirable, and not 
particularly in touch with its railway which has an air of uncer- 
tainty as to its future direction. We obtained no little height on 
these slopes, and gradually turning the base of the mountain, 
ascended over grass-covered slopes and up to the entrance of a 
valley, which in direction was taking us toward Inawashiro again, 
but which gradually narrowed to the base of a saddle connecting 
Bandaisan with its nearest neighbour. The trail straggled over 
these slopes which rose at a very easy grade. Once well in the 
valley, clumps of bushes and trees appeared, and the path became 
decidedly bad and the slope steeper until it began to climb up to the 
foot of the saddle where were located a group of two or three huts. 
These were found to be a hot spring, very primitive and plainly 
only of use to the country people roundabout. Here horses were 
left behind, and here also followed one of the agreeable surprises 
in life, for a ten minutes' climb up the zigzags brought me to the 
top of the saddle an4 the huts which were partly damaged in the 
eruption of '88, the elevation being 5000 feet. Off to the right 
lies the summit of the mountain ; to the left my road led down over 
the debris of the eruption to the village of Kawakami. There 
are some sulphur banks and hot pools here on the saddle mainly of 
interest in showing that the volcano still has plenty of life in it. 
Below lies the crater, and we started down over as rough a piece 
of ground as we could desire. In places the trail was pretty 
fair, but even then the sharp cinder played havoc with any kind of 
footgear. The debris was mainly made up of a tufa, almost an 
acid slag, and in the shape of fragments ranging from heaps of 
large bowlders piled up in confused hillocks to the finest sand. A 
favorite form for the trail to take was over these fragments some- 



IWASHIRO WAY 85 

what larger than road-metal, and a mile of this cut beyond repair 
a stout pair of oxhide boots. There seemed to be very little mud 
to cement this mass. The crater is very impressive. Properly 
speaking, it is a cleft. The walls tower up a thousand feet and 
more. At the head of the cleft — the actual crater — a few hot pools 
and fumaroles form the source of the poisonous little stream which 
flows down the side of the mountain. We lunched here to find 
out the grievous oversight of the leader of the expedition, and 
omission of " the boy " — no water in the commissariat. Of course 
there was nothing to be found in the immediate neighbourhood, 
and we would not have dared to drink it if there had been, for it 
almost certainly would have contained enough arsenic to give us 
at least grave discomfort of mind if not of body. The native 
himself rarely drinks water unless he has some information as to 
its source, and the prospects of " the boy " and myself were poor in- 
deed unless there happened to be a tea shed at the foot of the 
mountain, a thing hardly likely on such an out of the way excur- 
sion. On we went, scrambling down banks of rubble, then a piece 
of fair going over a little level. The great cleft stretched on the 
right extending all the way to the foot of the mountain. Looking 
back and to the left over the devastated country toward Lake 
Hibari, formed after the eruption by alteration of levels and dam- 
ming of the water courses, it was as great a contrast to the Waka- 
matsu plain with its rice-fields as can be imagined. The mountain 
itself is to be classed with the explosive type, and the eruption of 
1888 is almost the counterpart of that of Tarawera of New Zealand 
in 1886, which however was on a greater scale. In both cases the 
side of the mountain has been blown out, and an enormous mass 
of debris scattered over the exposed country. In the case of Tara- 
wera this was in the form of fine mud, the material being literally 
blown to dust and carried down by the torrents of rain following 
the eruption. There, too, at Tarawera, the effects on one side of 
the mountain have been tremendous, the outpouring of the liquid 
mud being enormous, covering the country for miles to a far 
greater extent than at Bandaisan. The country around Tara- 



86 SAKURAMBO 

wera however is somewhat desolate — fern-covered brackens — and 
great as is the contrast in crossing the divide between Lake 
Rotorua and Lake Rotomahana, it is not so great as between the 
two sides of Bandaisan. Our last scramble was a helter-skelter 
over bowlders and through and down the little stream flowing from 
the crater, and after five hours of this work we stalked through the 
little village of Kawakami which lies almost athwart the cleft. It 
came near being overwhelmed during the eruption, but escaped, 
lying just on the edge of the downpour. The loss of life was not 
so great at Bandaisan. Some four or five hundred perished, but 
the destruction of property was very great, a dozen villages being 
buried in mud and cinder. The inhabitants had warning and 
most of them had already left their homes for places of safety. 
There was no sign of tea shed or place to substitute for it. One 
female, m puris niJuralibiis and the bath, was the only living 
creature in sight. The rest of the inhabitants of the little hamlet 
seemed to have disappeared underground. As negotiations with 
the lady were not eji regie under the conditions we continued on 
down the valley to complete our circuit of the mountain and enter 
Inawashiro at the end opposite to that by which we had left it. It 
was a pretty walk down the river gorge. A fairly good cart track, 
with the Nagasegawa, the opposite hills, and the slopes of Ban- 
daisan to keep us company. About a mile from Inawashiro we 
crossed a mud flow curiously disting-uished by its sharp differentia- 
tion from the surrounding land. It narrowly missed Inawashiro. 
A pretty walk through orchards and along the paddy fields brought 
us again to our inn. The seven miles from Kawakami had not 
improved affairs, and, as with the good citizens of Orleans, Panta- 
gruel had seized us by the throats and our tongues lay out a yard 
long. This was soon remedied at the inn, and after boiling the 
stiffness out of my limbs before a larger and more interested audi- 
ence than the previous evening I stretched out on the soft cool 
iatami with a better appreciation of that necessary article of Jap- 
anese furniture than before the scramble over the rubble heaps 
of Bandaisan. 



IWASHIRO WAY 87 

The next morning I again made my way over the stony road 
to the station, which, after the experience of the day before, seemed 
a masterpiece of Mr. Macadam. A short run of half an hour 
along the lake landed me at Wakamatsu, a large Japanese town of 
the usual stamp, with a park occupying the site of the former castle. 
The revolution of 1868 saw hard fighting here, and Prince Aidzu 
was the last to show organized resistance on the Main Island to the 
triumphant southern clans. With the fall of Wakamatsu the 
Tokugawa sun had set forever. The town is prettily situated, 
out on the plain but close to foothills on the east. On a spur over- 
looking it is a temple from which one gets a beautiful view of the 
plain with its encircling mountains. We are not looking at it here 
so much from the end of the oval as when on Bandaisan, and the 
multum in parvo effect is not so evident. The temple has a very 
particular interest as the place where seventy-eight of Aidzu's 
clan committed hara-kiri after the fall of the castle. A large stone 
has been erected commemorating" the event and bearing the names 
of the men, heroes in the eyes of the Japanese and commanding 
respect in the eyes of Europeans. The question of suicide has not 
been judged in the same way East and West. Taking that chord 
of European feeling which is more or less one of connected senti- 
ment, we find that for 2500 years, while motives and justification 
have remained much the same, the necessity of such justification 
has always been felt and each particular case has had to plead on 
its own merits before the bar of public opinion. Warfare up to 
recent times has been very cruel, and suicide in preference to hard 
or degrading slavery or death by torture has been a frequent reason 
for such a course. Wretchedness, misery, loss of honour, have all 
furnished their victims, but it has always been understood they 
must fight to the last gasp. Death on the battlefield has always 
been held in high honour, but when that has failed it has been held 
justifiable to leave it to the future to retrieve lost ground. Suicide 
being distinctly an escape from greater evil than living, it has been 
justly held the man who fights his life out to the bitter end, using 
every ounce of energy and will to effect his object, is the greater 



88 SAKURAMBO 

man than he who voluntarily succumbs. In ancient and mediaeval 
days many a man would have spared himself years of suffering 
by the course of suicide, but he would have gained nothing in public 
opinion by doing so. Suicide, therefore, being a matter of emer- 
gency in western life, has never reached the stage of an elaborate 
code of etiquette. Certainty and rapidity were the two objects 
sought and the means adopted. There was but one form of 
suicide which was more formal in the ancient world, and that was 
the form of execution performed under official order and carried 
out by drinking juice of hemlock or by opening the veins. This is 
the form of suicide most nearly approaching to Japanese hara-kiri 
when performed as a punishment for some offence against the 
state. And with rare courage did these old ancients perform it, 
for they had neither the hope of the Japanese warrior in the due 
respect that his descendants would give him on his fulfilment of 
the Samurai code, neither had they the indifference as to the future 
that the scientific spirit of modern scepticism furnishes. They had' 
a very palpable and unpleasant Hell in the next world in which 
even the good got very little comfort. When with calm courage 
Atticus Vestinus opened his veins and smilingly bade farewell to 
the very beautiful world he had around him, he was having a 
much harder trial than if he fell in the heat of action or after a 
struggle with his master. The old faith in the gods to strike the 
balance of justice had'left him, the old superstition of the cold and 
dark Hades still remained to him. Men can die by a code, or can 
die when they have exhausted every effort to prevail, but to die 
without this preliminary of struggle or according to the capricious 
cold-blooded will of another, as he would crush a spider, is the 
hardest task of all. There were cases of course where the modern 
spirit of scepticism existed, but the Rome of the Emperors was 
Agnostic rather than Atheist. It had lost faith in its old gods and 
retained all its fear of them. But few had the investigating spirit 
of old Empedocles, who cast himself into the yawning crater of 
^tna to solve the question of that other world. The agnostic 
spirit in ancient philosophy while it did not countenance suicide did 



IWASHIRO WAY 89 

not condemn it, except on the grounds of to-day: That a man 
should make every use of the Hfe nature has given him. 

With the Christian Era of course the whole viewpoint 
changed. Suicide now became a matter of religious prohibition, 
an offence against God. And for 1900 years this view of it has 
held western society in an iron grasp. It is but little more than 
a century that Christian countries heaped every sign of obloquy 
on the suicide. He was buried at a crossroads with every degrad- 
ing accompaniment heaped on the convicted criminal. Like all 
such feelings this reasoning has not always been consistent. Most 
of the early martyrdoms were to all purposes suicides ; suicides 
without any more redeeming features than the Mohammedan who 
rushed to battle to ensure his reception into Paradise. So this 
•day western religions refuse burial in consecrated ground to a 
suicide, and our laws keep up the same spirit by punishing the un- 
successful attempt. The same spirit is shown in the acrobatics of 
coroners' juries who dodge everything they decently can to bring- 
in some other form of verdict than suicide. With all this strong 
tide of public opinion and religious conviction — certainty of pun- 
ishment or contempt in this world and certainty of Hell in the 
next — suicide could not be eliminated from the western world 
any more than from the eastern world. But the code of honour had 
to undergo modification. The code of honour that was to spring 
from the feudal institutions in Europe of the seventh century was 
quite as severe as any that sprang from those of Japan three hun- 
dred years later. Following the lines of ancient thought the indi- 
vidual man was responsible for the complete use of his life. It 
was not his to take but to use, the Gods or the Fates settled the 
question of its duration, to encroach on their sphere was sacrilege. 
Hence it was better to endure any sufferings in preference to 
felo de se, to cut himself off from God's congregation. Men, 
women and children perished in burning ruins or languished out 
years in noisome dungeons not for love of life but for the duty 
which their religion put on them to avoid every wilful semblance of. 
taking it themselves. Indeed in this direction we have a notable 



90 SAKURAMBO 

Japanese example when Konishi, the great Christian general of 
Hideyoshi, after the battle of Sekigahara and the final triumph 
of lyeyasu, refused to take refuge in the national custom 
of hara-kiri. He and his Christian companions submitted 
to the shame of death at the hands of the public exe- 
cutioner. Up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century 
man was decidedly a fighting animal. Every gentleman wore a 
sword which was his protection against personal affront. Now the 
question that might arise was a question of affront from a quarter 
too high for the victim to resent. There was a self-adjusting 
balance here between the lord and the retainer. If they had their 
duty of loyalty to him, he had in turn his duty to them, and a 
gratuitous insult to one against the accepted code would quickly 
bring the others to his support. The public opinion of the clan 
here operated certainly and quickly to determine the wrong, and 
that being done the remedy lay easily to hand. The lord was a 
leader not an absolutist. He had no more right to be disloyal to 
the clan than they to him. The man who rode rough-shod over 
the feelings of his retainers quickly found his various Achilles sulk- 
ing in their tents. The code of honour was too exacting to allow 
a man's self-respect to suffer. The world was wide. He could 
retire to his farm, or take his sword elsewhere without any loss 
of prestige. Not that treason was ever condoned any more in the 
West than among the Japanese samurai. Count Julian for his 
treason to his country will always be held in infamy by his country- 
men, but if he had plunged his sword through Roderic's body they 
would equally have applauded him. Even though they would have 
to take off his head afterward. As the religious bond has loosened 
in these present days, so suicide due purely to pessimism or inability 
to support the strain of modern life has become more frequent. 
From a scientific point of view it is to be condemned on ground of 
violation of Nature's law. Nature provides for our removal and 
should be allowed to operate in her own way. Besides, a man rep- 
resents so many units of energy to act or to be acted on by external 
forces. Government still pursues the attempted suicide, nominally 



IWASHIRO WAY 91 

on grounds of a violation of Statute Law based on God's law, but 
really on the scientific ground that a man belongs to the com- 
munity and not to himself. The latter ground is of course the 
only rational one. To punish a man for failing to kill himself 
carries with it a degree of bathos that should throw a ray of 
cheerfulness even into the mind of the would-be suicide, who if 
he still remains in the same frame of mind will certainly not be 
deterred by any such punishment from seeking his voluntary 
exit from his troubles at a more favourable opportunity, or if he 
has changed his mind will certainly not regard as punishment the 
lesser evil as compared with the greater he has just escaped. 

Suicide therefore in Europe was modified by the far wider 
extension of a man's possibilities. His sphere of action being 
thus extended, granting the reaching of an impasse in his present 
surroundings he could find a field more congenial to his honour. 
He was not in such a position that he had tamely to submit his 
honour to the will of another or seek the only outlet available— 
■self-destruction. As strictly as any Japanese sauiitrai was the 
European gentleman bound to loyalty to his chief, but if that chief 
failed him he could transfer his services to another field. The 
field of European politics was wide, and this could be done without 
detriment to his honour. In the West as in the East he who 
fought for the destruction of his own people was regarded with 
the scom due to a renegade, and but little respected by those who 
made use of him. There was plenty of fighting without having 
to meet one's former companions in arms on the field of battle. 
Various were the nations represented in the armies that followed 
the banner of the crusading chief or later of one of the " free 
companies," and to the standard of William the Silent or of 
Prince Eugene flocked the best swords in Europe. With the 
same underlying motives for the act, suicide in Japan took a dif- 
ferent development. A peculiar feature of Japanese political life 
cut off any such career to the Japanese samurai. In disfavour 
with his lord he had to become either a ronin — a more or less out 
of the pale character in so far as he had no support but his own 



92 SAKURAMBO 

sword — or to commit suicide. There was no middle course. Jap- 
anese politics were purely domestic and very local. They had no 
international relations, for the temporary invasion of the continent 
through Korea could hardly be classed as anything but episodes. 
Gibbon has graphically described the condition of the man who 
had become a source of offence and a stumbling block to the mas- 
ter of the Roman world. Within the bounds of civilization there 
was no place for him to hide his head. In the wide range of the 
body politic therefore, when it became a question of death or 
successful rebellion, the two influences reacted on each other to an 
extent that is shown in the fearful tyranny of the Emperors and 
their violent deaths. Roman philosophy was far too much ad- 
vanced to grant the divinity claimed by their Emperors. The 
Roman at heart was too much of a republican to admit that the 
Emperor was more than a part of the state. Multitudes would 
shout " Hail, divine Cccsar," but there was always in the back- 
ground the Ciceros, and Catos, and Senecas, to say " this is a man, 
very much of a man." In fact, in this very crux lies the parting 
of the ways between East and West. To the West the divinity 
lay in the sacredness of the community as represented in the man ; 
it was his office not his personality that was sacred. The old 
republican spirit of Rome is at the bottom of all of us. " Civis 
Romanus Sum " fitted well into the Germanic theory of the state. 
And whether by the aid of the Church or the aid of common sense, 
the state found means to get rid of the Imperator or its Rex' " by 
divine right " when the occasion arose. A little casuistry or defect 
in genealogy greasing the ways for his descent. To the East 
however the divinity lay in the monarch. He was not part and 
parcel of the community. He was above it and separated from 
it and representative of the gods who made it. This divinity was 
inherent in him, not a gift or spirit granted to him on his becoming 
head of the state. A laying on of hands, so to speak, which is the 
only sense that the " divine right of kings " ever attained in the 
West. To our minds of to-day it is hard to judge the illogical 
standpoint of a seeing, moving, active man in all his relations take 



IWASHIRO WAY 93 

on this attribute of divinity as an inherent part of his nature. He 
is just as much a descendant of the gods in his previous condition 
as when he occupies the throne. His divine nature has not 
changed. In the twinkhng of an eye all the former conditions 
change, and the man who a short time previously led his soldiers in 
triumph through the streets as a successful general, by the accident 
of death to his predecessor, becomes death to any mere mortal who 
looks on the divinitv of his face. Let us turn to good old " down- 
right " Montaigne where he makes Antigonus answer the poet 
Hermodorus who has compared him to Phoebus : " My friend, he 
that emptieth my close stool knoweth well, there is no such matter." 
The full development of this idea of divinity is probably due 
to China. In common with all eastern nations and some western 
ones the Japanese early attributed divine origin to their leaders, 
but many of the episodes of the prehistoric and early historic times 
anything but endorse the more extended views taken later on. 
With the adoption — sometime subsequent to the fourth century 
A. D. — of Chinese ideas in every department of thinking, Chinese 
ideals were made the standard, and the teachings of Confucius on 
the subject of the relation between inferior and superior, parent 
and child, husband and wife, became the religion, so to speak, of 
the country. With the retirement of the Emperor from the field 
of active politics, practical expression of loyalty became centred 
on the military leader, and an offence against that leader became 
an offence against the moral code by which the samurai was direct- 
ing his life. Such loyalty driven to its logical conclusion was likely 
to lead him in two directions to an impossible position. Where he 
would find his will in collision with his lord ; here the only choice 
lay between becoming a ronin or masterless man, for few would 
care to harbour him thereby bringing the vengeance of his master 
down on them; or he could commit suicide. Again, his duty lay 
in following his master to the end of any course he chose to take, 
and avenging him if he survived him. This would infallibly lead 
him to a collision with the governing power of the land, for an 
inferior had no right to raise his hand against a superior. As 



94 SAKURAMBO 

vengeance however was specifically required by the Confucian code, 
the morality of the vendetta was admitted and the form of execu- 
tion took the kinder one of suicide. Hence suicide passed from 
simply a form of death sought to escape intolerable surrounding 
conditions to become part and parcel of the Code of Honour. It 
was the necessary concomitant between a code of morals which 
sanctioned and enforced the vendetta, and the punishment required 
by outraged law, law necessary for the stability of any community. 
Here in distinction from implied condemnation of suicide we have 
its apotheosis in public opinion. And views on the subject have 
not changed in those modern days. Published excuses of modern 
hara-kiri are usually based on the ground that by the suicide the 
man's usefulness is extended. Living, such usefulness is ended, 
but by his death he can inspire his companions. The of^cer who 
is wounded in a charge commits hara-kiri, thereby relieving his 
men of the necessity of taking care of him and inspiring them to 
vengeance. I think it is cjuite sure that Japanese troops would 
need no such inspiration, and in the West instances are common 
where the fall of an officer leading his troops has had quite the 
reverse effect to terminating his usefulness. . They have obeyed 
his orders to go forward and with just as much readiness to avenge 
him. The government view of it is not very evident. There is no 
external sign of disapproval, although trained men have such value 
in these latter days of scientific warfare that it is hardly to be 
supposed that the gratuitous loss of a man they have been at no 
small trouble to educate to his present efficiency is regarded as 
balanced by considerations of the effect his suicide may have on the 
morale of the service. For the morale is certainly not maintained 
by any such anachronism as hara-kiri. If so, so much the worse 
for the service. It is a fact however that har::-kiri finds general 
support even among men of scientific training on just such grounds 
of expediency. On economic grounds it will die out, but it will die 
hard and then purely on the ground that it is detrimental to enforce 
such a code when men are valuable. There is one curious feature 
about the Japanese suicide that shows up the ultra-conservatism of 



IWASHIRO WAY 95 

the nation. It is still maintained in all its strictness as a form of a 
code. It is not only the end sought, but the means to that end 
have remained unchanged since the early days when it came into 
practice. As its origin is remote so it retains but slight trace of 
any refinement in that early race that adopted it. That part of 
the body whose influence on the brain is most clearly indicated is 
the belly, and the Japanese in common with other primitive nations 
made it the seat of life or the soul. Uncertainty of hand may spoil 
the attempt to take life by reaching the heart or other vital organs. 
With the deficient surgery of old days however the slashing of the 
entrails was an absolutely certain means of ensuring death, and, in 
the manner as performed by the Japanese, a speedy one. From its 
primitive intention simply of taking one's life it has passed into 
a formula still to be adhered to by this more enlightened age. 

Wakamatsu however has more cheerful sights than these 
blood-stained mementoes. Coming down the hill from the temple 
I was soon bowling along the hills to a little side valley some three 
miles from the town, and in which was located the little hot spring 
known locally as Higashiyama (East Mountain). If the Japanese 
town in the plain is not inviting, often these mountain hamlets built 
along the sides of a ravine present picturesque elements. Whether 
from the decided flatness of the architecture — there is but little 
pleasing about a Japanese home externally except the roof — and 
lack of the many old picturesque bridges such a common feature 
in the West, they are however at a disadvantage compared to 
European towns of the same class. Higashiyama was up to the 
average. The road wound along the bank of the brawling little 
river and up the narrowing valley, until near the head came in sight 
a group of roofs lining both sides of the stream. The houses 
beneath them were mainly inns, and devoted to the refreshment of 
both the outer and the inner man. Just across the bridge at the 
upper end of the hamlet was a very attractive looking one, on the 
edge of the stream and looking down the valley and across the 
huddled mass of rocks below. Kami San gave me a pleasant 
welcome, and transfer to the apartment on which I had had my eye 



96 SAKURAMBO 

for the last quarter of a mile was a matter of the few minutes 
necessary to remove shoes. The feast was ordered, and donning 
a bath-robe, I was soon on my way to the bath below. Here let me 
say that I have heard some things about the Japanese bath that I 
have not found so universal as one is led to believe. The Japanese 
do not bathe half a dozen times a day. And the Japanese does not 
spend a large portion of the day in a bath-tub. They are a deci- 
dedly cleanly people. In fact, there is no particular reason why 
they should not be. Nature has been very lavish with them in the 
matter of hot water, and it takes very little courage to get up an 
inclination for that kind of bathing. I have seen a Japanese using 
the cold bath in summer, as supplied by the river, but I never heard 
of one breaking the ice in the tub to get his plunge on a winter 
morning, a by no means unheard of feat among Anglo-Saxons. 
In fact, if only cold water is available, the Japanese labourer will 
fight as shy of it as the most unwashed peasant of southern Europe. 
There are hundreds of houses in the city of Yokohama without a 
tub to bathe in, and many a household would find it absolutely 
impossible to find the funds for the charcoal necessary to heat the 
water. It is even said among people resident in Japan that their 
servants do not use the tub. Now this too is a fact, but does not 
imply that the occupants of the hundreds of little houses and the 
said servants do not use the bath. They do, but it is at the public 
bath-house which is found in every cho or ward, and its chimney 
begins to pour out smoke about noon and its swinging lamp marked 
Furoba is the mecca of a stream of people from early afternoon 
until late at night. The Japanese not only bathes but he bathes in 
public, and enjoys not only the hot water but the chatter of his 
surroundings. In a sense it is a social gathering. A resort — for 
the lower classes — just as much as among the Italians in the old 
Roman days. 

As with our plunge baths, found in so many eastern cities and 
on the Pacific coast and at some springs, the bath is for common 
use and therefore requires some preliminaries before entering it. 
O Kami San took me to an apartment in which was a large square 



I WASH I RO WAY 97 

wooden tub fifteen feet to a side and about two feet deep. It 
differed from the ordinary Japanese bath in that hot water from 
the spring was constantly entering it and running out by an over- 
flow. All around this tub and nearly on a level with it — the edge 
of the tub being a couple of inches only above the floor level — the 
floor sloped to the tub, leaving however a crack about an inch wide 
around it. Disrobing, I put myself in the hands of the inn boy, 
and after being thoroughly soaped and scrubbed from head to foot 
was drenched with hot water until every trace of soap was removed, 
the soap and water of course running off through the crack to the 
drain below the tub. Then I was ready for the real bath, and 
getting into the tub stewed at pleasure. Higashiyama was not a 
particularly severe test as the water was but little, if at all, above 
40° C. These natural hot springs have at least this advantage, 
that nature regulates the heating apparatus and is a far more 
regular guide than nesan, whose only criterion of excessive tem- 
perature is boiling. There is a certain consideration due one's 
fellow travellers that makes me somewhat chary of adding cold 
water to the bath, and thereby spoiling it for the Japanese who 
are accustomed to take it much hotter than Europeans. They do 
not hesitate to do that themselves, but the standards are so different 
that the mean puts it out of use for them until it can heat up again. 
I should say that the love of hot water seems to date from the 
dawn of history, for in the very twilight period of the gods, their 
divinityships had to content themselves with the ordinary facilities 
afforded to him who travels in waste places, and perform their 
ablutions in the river and mountain streams — with fearfully prolific 
results if the old legends of their offspring thus born are to be given 
any credence. Izanagi, the creator of Japan, thus gave rise on his 
return from Hell to some score of deities. While my bath was 
in progress O Kami San had fished a trout out of her fish-pond, 
knocked together a little omelet, and was ready to provide the inner 
as well as the outer man with raiment, and very pleasant memories 
of the little inn were those I took away with me. 

From Wakamatsu my way lay south through the mountains 

7 



98 SAKURAMBO 

toNikk5. The next morning I left very comfortable quarters at the 
Shimizuya — one of the better class of Japanese inns and beautifully 
gotten up in its appointments. Polished wood, natural fretwork, 
beautiful screens, were the more material surroundings, and the 
human machinery was noticeable for neatness, completeness, and 
quietness. The publican does not differ much the world over and 
Japanese inns furnish the usual types, ranging from the modest 
establishment of some fishing village where the clientele are the 
smaller commercial man stopping for the convenience of some little 
coasting steamer, or the countryman on one of his minor mis- 
sions — purchases at the local centre or to meet the aforesaid drum- 
mer — to the aristocratic establishment whose clientele is drawn 
from the upper stratum of the land and where coarseness or noisy 
merriment would be as much out of place as in one of our own 
more recherche hotels. The life of a Japanese inn rarely begins 
before the close of the business day. The Japanese travels very 
light, his personal impedimenta consisting of a very small grip or 
what will readily be folded into a large handkerchief, the more 
frequent companion of his travels and usually more or less pleasing 
in colour. All day he is busy on his rounds. If a drummer, his 
samples go with him on his own back in the shape of a huge pile of 
boxes in which economy of space has been made a fine art, or on 
the back of a porter if too elevated to do that part of the labour 
himself. Only at niglitfall does he seek an inn and a Japanese 
commercial house then takes on a great bustle. The nesans are 
busy running with tea trays and kimonos, for the first thing after 
getting fairly ensconced with his modest belongings is the bath, and 
the inn relieves him of any necessity for providing garments for 
that purpose. In a country where privacy is unknown, and social 
interference may be said to have become as much a part of the 
natural life as with the assemblages of our zoological gardens, 
where the overpowering interest of the individual, so prominent in 
western life, are not the isolating medium as with us, the inn is 
one big family. Often, if crowded, three, four, or more are 
chummed together in one room. Sake and geisha and talk while 



IWASHIRO WAY 99 

away the evening hours, and such an estabhshment, where paper 
screens are the only partition wall, give but small chance of sleep 
until the last merrymakers have gone to rest and the tinkle of the 
samisen has ceased for the night. To see a Japanese curled up 
on his futons and sleeping next door to the most merciless racket 
is such a common occurrence that one is led to believe that they 
must be much less sensitive to noise than the average European. 

At Shimizuya however there was no such experience to go 
through. In the morning nesan appeared with the pickled plums 
and tea and the more valued assurance that in spite of threatening 
appearance it was not likely to rain, which prophecy held good until 
near the end of the day and the journey; and breakfast over, I 
was sent speeding south over the plain at the moderate pace that 
two coolies would take who had nearly a three days' job in front 
of them. The Japanese coolie is by no means so bad as he is 
painted — or so good. His ethical standard is not extravagantly 
high, in fact it is scandalously Ioav at times, and it is just as well 
the average foreigner is unable to understand the full nature of the 
subjects of conversation and the jests which give rise to so much 
merriment among his coolies and passersby, for the exchange of 
compliments among them is by no means always suited to delicate 
ears. His occupation however is greatly aided by his wits, and 
while dragging a ricksha is by no means a highly intellectual 
pursuit, capturing his prey and squeezing it to the last go sen is an 
accomplishment. Fares are regulated by the police, and the guilds 
of ricksha men are sharply checked up ; but indiscriminate appeal 
to the police is not always advisable. The men have their bounds 
and cannot be made to go out of them, and a traveller's reputation 
goes ahead of him by a system of wireless telegraphy. Given the 
proper conditions and an unreasonable disposition one can well find 
himself under the necessity of shouldering the baggage and march- 
ing out of some untravelled spot as best he can. Coolies of every 
kind have disappeared like magic, the field labour (at 30 sen a day) 
has become so important that four and five times that amount can- 
not tempt a man, a cow, or even a woman to come forward. The 

LOFC. 



100 SAKURAMB5 

ricksha man is usually to be found in a town of any size, and which 
of necessity has communication by highway with the outside world, 
but he is not often found in the small villages of mountain districts, 
and simply reaching such a place, even if on a highway, is no guar- 
antee that one can exchange one's legs for an easier means of 
progress. Incidentally one feature of travel in Japan can be re- 
ferred to, and that is safety. People often complain of the blank 
which is brought to them to be filled out with information for the 
police. The questions at times seem superfluous — as to age, in- 
tended route, and family relations even unto the third and fourth 
generation — and at times they are followed up by a personal inter- 
view, particularly in the case of a foreigner, so as to make it 
troublesome. As a matter of fact and largely as a matter of form, 
Japanese have to fill out the same blank, and whatever the motive 
of being so particular in the case of foreign travellers it can be 
passed over in the knowledge that it makes his travelling very safe. 
It would be very difficult for a foreigner to disappear in Japan. 
His personal appearance differs so from the native that, among a 
people who spend their time in noting- all the petty details going on 
around them, some one is bound to have observed his movements 
even in such frequented places as the treaty ports. Nay, even in 
visits to the Yoshiwara and such places his entrance and exit are 
reported to and noted by the police; which fact would be clerical 
and female sight-seers can bear in mind. In the country he could 
not disappear. He is registered from hotel to hotel. The ricksha 
men who take him are known and are responsible for his delivery at 
the other end of his journey. As all are not saints in any calling of 
life so the ricksha man is by no means free from black sheep among 
his flock, but the opportunities of such gentry are confined to the 
petty fleecing that they can effect by their wits, and in which they are 
white as driven snow compared to the honourable fraternity of cab 
drivers. They are well up in the points of interest along their own 
particular stamping ground, and no better guide is to be found than 
a kurumaya who takes an interest in his fare. The kiiruma or 



IWASHIRO WAY 101 

ricksha as a means of conveyance, I think, has been grossly over- 
praised. It is the best there is in the country, but there its good 
quaHties end. The motion partakes somewhat of that of a dog- 
cart. One must absolutely recline or sit bolt upright, and when 
hours are to be passed on the road both of these attitudes are by 
no means unqualified joy. When travelling through the moun- 
tains where real work is to be done it is necessary to have the hood 
up so that the pushman can get some purchase on the vehicle. 
There is no substitute for it however but one's legs, which indeed 
are to be recommended when time permits and they are available. 
A horse would be as troublesome as Wang's elephant, as to pro- 
viding provender and finding shelter for it when the day's journey 
was finished. 

The first part of my route lay over the Wakamatsu plain. 
Near the end of the valley, then narrowing to^ the Funakotoge 
(pass), we took to the hills and soon had risen to some height. 
The view toward Bandaisan and Wakamatsu was beautiful. The 
road was well graded and only near the top of the pass was it 
necessary to do any walking. It was a pretty ride, winding under 
the trees, around the little ravines, and giving bits of sylvan scenery 
much like home, perhaps because of the absence of houses and tea- 
sheds and such marks peculiar to the particular species of the genus 
homo inhabiting the land. It is remarkable how man puts his 
mark on a land. The summer days spent in wood or field, lying on 
turf or rock, idly chewing a blade of grass and without set purpose 
letting the eyes roam over the surroundings, is stamping on boy- 
hood's mind a standard landscape that will never be forgotten. A 
landscape containing a host of minute details of which at the time 
the observer has no consciousness, even if it be but a blurred image 
of some distant house or a column of smoke rising from some 
unseen habitation but whose familiar outlines he can easily frame 
in his mind's eye. Unconsciously in these early years he is adding 
to his sense impressions, to the photographs stored away in mem- 
ory, the bias of his race mentality. He is adding that element, 
external to the scene in front of him, and from which he never will 



102 SAKURAMBO 

be able to free himself. Hence certain types of scenery have the 
pleasing familiarity of old friends. We are at home in them and 
drop our mental alertness or unconsciously critical attitude of com- 
parison. This same effect can be carried into other countries. In 
such a wide range as between England and New Zealand the land- 
scape bears the same stamp of familiarity to our minds, the same 
vistas of sea and shore, and we feel at home beside a Welsh brook 
or looking down from the heights of Dunedin. Some of this sense 
of familiarity is lost among peoples whose kinship is not so close to 
us — as on the continent of Europe, but a good part remains. Lit- 
erature, our reading, is partly responsible for this. One never has 
this sense of familiarity in Japan: The landscape always remains 
strange, and involuntarily the faculty of comparison — essentially a 
hostile faculty — is at work within us. In part this is due to Nature 
herself. Japan is a volcanic country and a small country, where 
Nature has seen fit to cram a good deal of material into a limited 
space. There is a paucity of the rounded outline so familiar to 
American or European eyes. Nature does not seem to have had 
time to soften down her outlines. To an Hawaiian the outline of 
the Japanese hills would seem familiar. The main difficulty is 
however the human element, and a thatched roof, a glimpse of 
tatami, or the barley or wheat spread on mats and lying in the sun, 
at once casts an unfa^niliar outre tint over the landscape. Add the 
blue cotton tights of the native himself, and even if one has been 
successful in mentally eliminating the bamboo-grass springing up 
between the oaks, chestnuts, and birches, we are at once back in 
Japan and half way round the world again from our old home. 
Lying on the border of a Maine lake or on the bank of the Merced 
River in the Yosemite we have the sense of restful familiarity, a 
feeling that never is felt by the side of any Japanese stream. 

On this walk I saw for the first and only time a mainushi, the 
only poisonous snake found on the main island of Japan. It is of 
the viper species, and the particular specimen was about a foot in 
length, of inconspicuous marking-s and a dirty brownish yellow 
colour. I had stretched out my hand to pick a flower growing in the 



IWASHIRO WAY 103 

cleft of a rock and noted him just in time, for he was coiled close by 
and with no idea of making off. A blow from my stick soon settled 
him and the ricksha men identified him. The peasants have 
curious superstitions about them. I had described to me by a 
witness the process of skinning the wriggling living serpent, cutting 
off the head and gouging out and eating then and there the eyes, 
the rest of his snakeship going into the peasant's basket for some 
subsequent occult proceedings. The lucky finder by this perform- 
ance was ensured against sickness for the rest of the year. I 
•omitted the ceremony. They figure largely in the pharmacopoeia 
■of the lower classes, and pickled tnamushi fresh and stale are a 
matter of sale and barter. There was no view from the top of the 
pass and the road down the other side became decidedly worse. 
The rest of the day's journey was through most picturescjue river 
and valley country, settled enough to add human interest to the 
scene, and with the contrasting beauty of man's cultivation of the 
■soil and the wild and rugged on Nature's side with smiling, peace- 
ful touches. At one point we left the rickshas and walked through 
one of the numerous gorges along a path in places supported by 
arms resting against the rock wall towering above us, and the river 
boiling along some twenty feet below, crossing back again and 
rejoining our vehicles near a hamlet called Yadoshima. At places 
through this mountain country I ventured to refill my water bottle. 
I say " ventured " advisedly, for one must be able to get a very 
good idea of the source of the water. There may be a little plateau 
above draining its poisonous irrigation canal into the sparkling 
brook. Some miles of this mountain country brought me to a 
wider valley in the centre of which was the little town of Tajima, 
twenty-five miles from Wakamatsu. Just how many the inn could 
accommodate " though puzzling was not beyond conjecture." Two 
tiny rooms were cut off at one end, and when we were ensconced 
we filled the house. As a matter of fact " one mat, one man " 
measurement would enable quite a large party to find quarters. A 
great deal of tobacco is grown all through this district, and every 
farmhouse through the country and in the suburbs of the town 



104 SAKURAMBO 

seemed to be engaged in drying and curing the leaf. Tobacco is 
one of the foreign importations to which the Japanese early took 
a great affection. It was introduced by the Portuguese during the 
early intercourse of the sixteenth century. We will not hold the 
Portuguese responsible for the present product. As in other direc- 
tions the native has presumably modified it to his taste. Japanese 
tobacco hardly deserves the name of that noble plant (not weed), 
and it is unfortunate that they did not disguise it under a native 
name. French tobacco and the still ranker product of the Italian 
monopoly are odours of " Araby the Blest " compared to it. In 
the form of snuff I have not heard of its use; a practice by the 
way very common among the mountaineers through the Allegheny 
region of the United States, although its use elsewhere has almost 
died out. Western ideas have full sway and much better enforce- 
ment among the Japanese as to the use of tobacco by minors, and 
there is trouble ahead for the boy's parents who have been warned 
against allowing their children to smoke. The policeman keeps a 
sharp eye on such youngsters and as the registration system is very 
complete the age is a matter of easy and prompt determination. 

The next day was a repetition of the previous treat of river, 
gorge, and mountain scenery, bringing me at night to a prettily 
situated little inn which makes up the hot spring resort known as 
Kawaji. The bath was a large pool close to the bank of the river, 
and was swarming with Japanese, male, female, and kodomo 
created he them. The river itself looked very tempting on the hot 
August afternoon. There was a convenient eddy, a natural basin, 
and it was much to be preferred to the swarm of humanity close 
at hand, so I " tubbed " there to my own great satisfaction and 
aroused curiosity of my neighbours. The Japanese are convinced 
as to the more or less " eccentricity " (politely speaking) of the 
foreigner, but here was a convincing case under their eyes. Not 
only a deliberate immersion in cold water but a deliberate choice of 
an unnecessary evil. If the question de lunatico inqiiirendo had to 
come before that jury of " Japs " I would have no show. We 
got out of the mountains the next day, through more fine scenery 



IWASHIRO WAY 105 

and over as bad a road as I have travelled in Japan. Walking 
was out of the question as the road was ankle deep in mud from 
side to side, through which treacherous depths yawned, such ruts as 
only the years of traffic of a Japanese road can produce. Stones 
and bowlders were hidden under this glutinous covering, making 
the road resemble to some degree the bed of a mountain torrent. 
In places the ricksha men lifted the whole apparatus, vehicle and 
rider, and carried it on to the next piece of dry ground. They 
were a hardy mountain lot of men, very different from the same 
fraternity as found in the large towns of the plain. Individually 
they were most of them going to get but little beside their " gift 
money " at the end of the trip. At Tajima they had gambled most 
of the future away and the lucky man, hiring a substitute, had 
hied him back to Wakamatsu to blow it in on ease and sake. 
Gambling is most strictly forbidden and relentlessly pursued by the 
government. And justly so, for the lower class Japanese has but 
little idea of the future ; any more than the Thomas cat on the back 
fence. He lives strictly for to-day and lets to-morrow take care 
of itself, and a surplus in hand proceeds to blow it in at once. The 
government does its best to correct this spirit of improvidence 
so fatal to the material progress of the nation. We came out on 
the plain and crossed the river at Naka-iwa, a well known picnic 
resort near Nikko. The scene is here very picturesque, looking up 
and down the river which is divided by an island, and hence the 
name — " centre rock." There is no tea-house worthy of the name, 
but an hour's run across the plain took me into Imaichi, a town on 
the railway, and the Reiheishi Kaido, that famous avenue leading 
into Nikko. 



IV 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 

" E poi il dolore e un gran ricostituente dell' uomo credete e in certi 
casi e un confortante indizio di vitalita morale, perche dove non vi 
e dolore, vi e cancrena.'"' — Malombra. 

From Imaichi to Nikko is one of the most striking sections 
of a grand highway that stretches across the country for more than 
twenty miles. The very narrowness of the roadway adds to the 
great height of the ancient cryptomerias closely lining the sides 
and walling it in from the surrounding country. In places sunk 
between grassy walls, gradually increased in height as the roadway 
between them slowly wore away beneath the feet of generations of 
travellers, it has the appearance of a long green tunnel, but this is 
soon relieved by the reappearance of the smiling countryside, the 
rushing river close at hand, and — to right and left — the forest- 
clad hills. One traveller, in days of the past, moved along this 
road unconscious even of the pomp surrounding him. The Sho- 
gun, carried to his tomb, recked little of the beauty of the world 
about him. Those who carried him probably thought more about 
their prospects under his successor. We of to-day can follow it 
with far lighter heart up through the long village of Hachi-ishi 
or lower Nikko to the stone steps mounting the slopes of the hill 
until, at the end of a broad avenue, we stand under a great stone 
torii and in front of the most beautiful temples in Japan. Here 
in close proximity lie buried two men who put their stamp on a 
nation as few men have done — lyeyasu the great and lyemitsu the 
little, grandfather and grandson. The system devised by the first 
and carried to perfection by the second so peculiarly fitted into the 
previous history of this island country that it is well worth going 
into such history to some little extent. Especially of that earlier 
portion of it of which comparatively little is heard in popular form. 
io6 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 107 

Previous to the close of the fifth century A. D. Japanese his- 
tory is extremely vague. There is no reason to believe that the 
people had any other means of recording events except by oral 
tradition. The accounts of those times are full of miraculotis 
events and still more miraculous periods. Chinese and Korean 
notices begin about the first century of our era. China at that 
time extended her influence to northern Korea, and there were 
Chinese resident officials occupied, as usual, in scribbling wonderful 
information as to everything that they saw and heard for the 
benefit of the imperial throne. The Koreans themselves cjuickly 
took up Chinese learning, to hand it on some three centuries later 
to their neighbours, the Japanese. In the first four centuries there- 
fore of the Christian era we hear of the Japanese mainly in the 
unenviable light of piratical descents on Korea to get what plunder 
they can and to carry off slaves. They are described as a brave, 
hard drinking, hard fighting people, inhabiting very roughly built 
huts or houses, moving their habitations from place to place, and 
spending most of their time in the chase or in wars between the 
petty tribes. In fact, at the corresponding period, they resemble 
in many ways our Anglo-Saxon ancestors before they left their 
German home to settle in Britain. At the end of the fifth century, 
however, an embassy from Korea included teachers and a present 
of the Chinese classics. This first introduction of learning, more 
probably the means of learning, like the introduction of Christi- 
anity among the Saxons, had an immediate and wonderful effect. 
The accounts of a more complex social system are very specific. 
The full effect, however, was not obtained until the reign of Kim- 
mei (540-571 A. D.). In 552 A. D. the embassy from Korea 
included a gift from the king of Kudara of a statue of Buddha, 
together with the holy books. Now this introduction of Buddhism 
had a far more reaching effect than appears at first glance. As 
in the case of Christianity ten centuries later, Buddhism had to 
fight for its ground. His councillors warned the Emperor — 
" Our kingdom is of divine origin, and the Emperor has already 
many gods to worship. If we adore those of foreign kingdoms, 



108 SAKURAMBO 

our own will be angered." Intimidated therefore by this advice he 
gave these presents to one of his ministers, Soga no Iname, who 
much taken with the new cult established the worship of the image 
at one of his temples. An epidemic, however, following soon 
after, was attributed to the new religion and the temple was burnt 
to the ground and tlie image cast into the river. This seems to 
have been only a temporary check, for in the next reign Buddhism 
is again violently suppressed. It seems to have taken a strong 
hold in the family of Iname, for we find his son and successor 
Umako petitioning to be allowed to maintain the cult privately 
for his own peace of mind, which was granted him ; but there are 
already two parties in the land based on the very radical ground 
of differing religion. There is an incident of some interest re- 
ferred to in this reign of Bidatsu (572-585 A. D.), namely, the 
reception of a letter from Korea written in invisible ink, presumably 
some cobalt salt, for the writing appears on exposure to heat. 

A development quite as important as Buddhism is to be attrib- 
uted to Bidatsu reign. When he first appears in history the 
Emperor is, in plain terms, a Mongol chief, fighting at the head of 
his tribe, and it is only after wars and strife that his tribe establishes 
its supremacy over the tribes of kindred nationality. At the time 
we are speaking of the system had apparently been reduced to a 
condition not unlike the days of the Heptarchy in England. As 
in most eastern nations, the head of the state was recognized as of 
divine descent, but his real physical power depended much on his 
ability to maintain himself in his position of supremacy. A system 
of government had, however, been thoroughly established, and 
already in 550 A. D. we find the Emperor surrounded by council- 
lors whose opinions have much weight, and furthermore that 
precedents are being given their value. It is generally assumed 
that the first disappearance of the Emperors dates from Fujiwara 
times. Umako, who seems to have been a very able man. was 
however practically a Mayor of the Palace. He had supreme in- 
fluence over the Prince Regent Umaya. On the death of Bidatsu 
there was a dispute over the succession, apparently between the 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 109 

Buddhists and the supporters of the native rehgion. Umako 
gained his point, had his antagonist put to death, placed a friendly 
prince on the throne, and practically reigned as minister. Sujun, 
the succeeding Emperor, showed a tendency to rebel against this 
subjection, but Umako removed him by assassination and estab- 
lished the female line in his place. When he died about 625 A. D. 
Buddhism not only was triumphantly established in the land but 
Umako's son, Soga no Yemisi, succeeded his father in the manage- 
ment of the kingdom. 

As in many nations of primitive times the priesthood at this 
date seems to have been hereditary in two families. One of these 
was known as the Nakatomi. Soga no Yemisi as prime minister 
carried things with quite as high a hand as his father. He asso- 
ciated his son Iruka with him. who was still more disliked than 
his father. Neither the nobility or the Imperial House took kindly 
to this supremacy of Soga and Iruka in the Government and the 
reign ofKokyoku (642-4 A. D.), sister and wife of the preceding 
Emperor Yomei, was marked by a series of barons' wars in which 
the Minister had decidedly the best of it. A conspiracy of the 
princes of the Imperial House was given practical direction by 
Nakatomi Kametari, and at the height of his power and security, 
Iruka was assassinated in the very presence of the Empress. The 
conspirators then completed their work by promptly attacking the 
house of Soga himself, in the flames of which he perished together 
with part of the imperial archives. Nakatomi stepped into his 
shoes as far as influence in the Government went, and up to the 
time of his death in the reign of the Emperor Tenji (662-672 
A. D.) he is a prominent feature in everything that related to the 
Government. It is worth stopping here to note a marked differ- 
ence in the tone of the annals of these reigns. Before the intro- 
duction of Chinese influence they show palpably the roughness of 
the times. Habits are gross and ceremonial is very slack. Both 
improve very rapidly after the sixth century, and ceremonial, evi- 
dently copied from Chinese models, becomes the prominent feature 
in the accounts given of these monarchs. Offices multiply, and the 



110 SAKURAMBO 

person of the Emperor is soon to gain a sanctity which certainly 
before that time it did not possess. Certainly the rough and ready 
time of Yiiriaku (457-477 A. D.) had little to do with the pomp 
and ceremony with which a white pheasant is brought and pre- 
sented to the Emperor Kotoku (645-654 A. D.). The year name 
is changed on account of this auspicious event and all the prisoners 
in the Empire are set at liberty. Yiiriaku would have eaten the 
bird and made a few more prisoners if it had disagreed with him. 
The reign of Tenji (662-672 A. D.) could pass without note. 
There was apparently an unsuccessful attack on Korea which was 
repulsed, but which furnished a complement of slaves, an element 
particularly needed in the new civilization of the nation still sadly 
lacking in skilled workmen as teachers. One important event 
marks the supremacy of old Nakatomi Kametari, who on his death 
is given the family name of Fujiwara, and to whose family passes 
all his honours. The part this family played and plays in Japanese 
annals makes this a notable event. We should also remark here 
two important features of Japanese life which add much to the 
strength of the family as compared with Europe. Namely, polyg- 
amy and adoption. To us, this would only imply the same blood 
in the first case, polygamy. Plurality of wives and concubinage 
is a great safeguard to maintain a family name in existence, and 
when this is bolstered up by adoption — from a cadet branch if pos- 
sible, or a stranger if necessary — it practically ensures it. 

As at this point we enter on what can be described as the 
Golden Age of Japanese art and literature, and it is worth while to 
take a glance at the attendant conditions which in some ways 
differentiate Japan from the western world. The conditions under 
which Japan and the western nations started on their careers were 
radically different. So much so as to give a peculiar stamp to the 
civilization evolved and due to these attendant conditions. If the 
Roman Empire had fallen under the blows of a single powerful 
antagonist, it is fair to presume that the onward course of civiliza- 
tion would have had but little check. Rome, however, fell under 
the onset of different nations, and, their task accomplished, the 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 111 

brunt of defending their spoils against rivals fell on these different 
nations. The fall therefore of the Empire was marked by a hurly- 
burly, of which South Europe was the battleground. After the 
Goth, the Lombard; who in turn succumbed to the Frank. The 
Franks might have developed at this early date — the eighth century 
— a great literature and art, and as they began to do three centuries 
later, but they were too busy on their frontiers, and the division of 
the kingdom on Charlemagne's death was the signal for another 
wild struggle covering the whole of Europe from what is now 
known as Russia to the waters of the Atlantic. A point to be noted 
here is that this is a struggle of nations. Internal strife will halt 
and impede the development of a nation. Foreign strife absolutely 
puts an end to it. The struggle is too serious. It is one of 
national existence, and in that age one of life and death to the men 
engaged in it. But little respect was paid to anything attached to 
an enemy. His very memory was to be rooted off the surface of 
the earth. Hence any art that a conquered nation had succeeded 
in developing was marked for destruction, and it was only with 
time, and as the concjueror had opportunity to come under the 
influence of the superior civilization of the conquered, that the few 
wrecks that were left were viewed with an eye to their possible 
usefulness. Venice, however, early in the ninth century was noted 
for its metal working, its woven textures in silk and wool, in velvet 
and in brocade, its beautiful dyes, and its glass work famous to this 
day. As Mr. Molmenti tells us, " the goldsmiths especially reached 
the dignity of a most exquisite art in those little masterpieces of 
figures, imitated from the byzantine, in those ornaments of gold 
and pearl, of which mention is made in the will of the Doge Giu- 
stiniano Partecipazio in 829, and in those gold chains, the chosen 
ornament of ladies as of the Venetians in general." Literature, 
however, was all in Latin, and swamped under the scholasticism 
which followed Charlemagne's times. Only in the tenth century 
and in northern France did the native tongue make itself timidly 
heard in the chansons and in the earlier Arthurian legends of Brit- 
tany. In the eleventh century we have the ripened development of 



112 SAKURAMBO 

this ballad literature in Provence. Proven gal literature worthily 
represents the refinement of the earlier times, and is the nursery 
of the future Italian and French literatures. In the face of the 
existence of neo-latinism and the Provencal literature it is an 
exaggeration to say that Europe was a collection of barbarous 
tribes, and that learning was only kept alive by the Saracens. To 
these latter Europe did owe much, but it can be added that they 
were also a positive hindrance to the peaceful development of the 
great Frank kingdom, continually threatening one of its flanks. 
It was not until the twelfth century that modern Europe fairly 
began to take shape, and from that time on a development of art 
and literature was not only possible but an actual fact. It had 
to take place largely under the shadow of the church, for Europe 
was still not only a battleground but suffering from the warlike 
habits incurred by the ages of disorder, and the church was slow 
in removing the ban placed on beauty by early Christianity. It is 
not to be denied that Europe in some ways gained much by the 
very rough education through which it had passed. The very 
complexity, the friction of nations, produced a width of range, a 
liveliness of thought, a curiosity of understanding, a fellowship 
among its learned men, that was most beneficial, and which when 
the time came for its development has placed it far ahead of 
, anything which the East has been able to develop on its much 
narrower lines. 

The physical geography of Japan is by no means peculiar. It 
occupies a position strictly analogous to that of Great Britain. 
The difference lies in its neighbours. The Chinese are a sluggish, 
peaceful people, and perhaps the only race in which the profession 
of the soldier is held in contempt. Their Tartar conquerors were 
no sailors. The Koreans carried the same qualities to a greater 
exaggeration, and also they were split up into small kingdoms 
singly as inefficient as any member of the Heptarchy. If there 
was no other evidence, it would be hard to believe that any form of 
strong central government existed among the warlike Japanese, 
from the fact that no effort was made to come in contact with their 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 113 

neighbours, which necessarily in the early period of their history 
would have taken the form of conquest. From lack of pressure 
therefore, internal and external, they were left to develop in their 
island kingdom with only such outside influence moulding their 
civilization as they chose to adopt. Communication with China, 
their greatest neighbour, was always very spasmodic. No great 
trade ever sprang up between the two peoples, and the interchange 
■was mainly directed to the adoption of Chinese ideas on ethics and 
politics. These were adopted and adapted wholesale ; not so much 
in a continuous stream of influence, although through priests and 
travellers a fairly constant communication was maintained, as at 
set periods during which there was a fashionable rage for Chinese 
models in art and literature. During the whole period of their 
national existence therefore the Japanese were left to themselves, 
without external pressure of any kind, to develop these models as 
was most pleasing to them and their national genius. What pres- 
sure existed was of an internal nature, due to disturbances in the 
state. This will hamper, and in Japan did hamper, the continuous 
and peaceful development of its art and literature, but these were 
never broken off and crushed until there remained for revival 
nothing but a tradition. Also, in the peculiar nature of the political 
structure another preservative element existed. Namely, the Im- 
perial Court. Separate from the political struggles it was always 
the centre of the refinement of the country. It underwent periods 
of neglect and depression, but as such it was sacred against direct 
attack, and it is owing to the existence of this peculiar institution 
that much of Japanese ancient art and literature was encouraged 
and preserved. 

The period to which we have now come however had an 
added advantage. It was one of comparative peace. Barons' 
wars there were but they rarely threatened the imperial throne. 
They were mainly struggles of ambitious nobles getting a foothold 
on the outskirts of the Empire, and to develop later into that 
ominous power which displaced the old Imperial line and relegated 
it to a high priesthood in the nation. The Yemishi or barbarians 



114 SAKURAMBO 

had been driven into the northern part of the main island, and wars 
with them had Httle more importance to the court at Kyoto than the 
fighting with Indians on the western plains in the fifties and sixties 
had to the eastern United States. Time enough had elapsed — over 
three hundred years — for the native art to develop, and it was now 
prepared to establish a school with Kose Kanaoka as its master. 
Later to develop into the Tosa School, to this day taking first place 
in Japanese contributions to art. The same peaceful conditions, 
combined with a brilliant court, greatly aided the development of a 
literature, which in its description of manners, in its short stories, in 
the delicate fancy displayed in its poetry, and in its comparatively 
clean lines of thought, compares favourably with the most brilliant 
part of the Yedo period. In connection with this period which we 
have been discussing, and that which we are now to discuss, a few 
dates from English history will not be out of place. We will pass 
over such a landmark as Gariononum or Burgh Castle in Norfolk, 
for this is of Roman times. In Bede's time, however, the founda- 
tion of St. Albans was four hundred years old. Bede himself 
chronicles the first council of the English Church held at Hertford 
in 673 A. D. and presided over by Theodore, seventh Archbishop of 
Canterbury. Ely's foundation dates from 670 A. D. In fact, in 
the year 700 A. D. the Saxon kingdoms of Britain compare favour- 
ably with the island Empire in Japan as far as all material civiliza- 
tion goes. But wheref'the Japanese have in front of them a period 
of peace in which to develop the civilization obtained from their 
continental neighbours, the Saxon is to face the Dane and the 
Northmen before he is brought into contact with the civilization of 
southern Europe introduced by the Norman French. 

But to return to Fujiwara and the course of the Empire. If 
the Emperors were as yet real monarchs in their kingdom they had 
all the drawbacks of such real authority. On Tenji's death in 671 
A. D. there was a disputed succession between nephew and uncle, 
which seems to some degree to have been started by the suspicions 
of the former as to his uncle's real intentions. After a number of 
pitched battles the nephew's (Otomo) army was finally routed 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 115 

and dispersed, and to avoid capture he hung himself. Temmu, the 
uncle, who reigned until 686 A. D., gives us some idea of the 
increasing ceremonial and luxury. Fetes and dances are a feature 
of the court life. His reign is also marked by the discovery of 
silver in Tsushima, the island lying between Japan and Korea. It 
is in the reign of Mommu (697-707 A. D.) however that the 
intimate connection between the Imperial House and Fujiwara 
began. This Emperor married a Fujiwara and with few excep- 
tions the wives of the succeeding Emperors were all taken from 
this family. Fujiwara are often referred to as the first Mayors of 
the Palace, but in a sense they have but little connection with the 
great ruling families that succeeded them — Taira, Minanioto, 
Ho jo, Ashikaga, and Tokugawa. In fact, the Emperor becomes 
so indistinguishable in blood from this family that they can claim 
as much to sit upon the throne as any Bourbon or Hapsburg. The 
Emperor is really their representative, and up to the twelfth century 
it is a genuine rule of the head of this family, acting mainly as 
regent ; but sometimes, at the end of the regime, reappearing in the 
person of the Emperor himself. This is a very different thing 
from the essentially hostile interests as represented by the later 
usurpers, who had no connection whatever with the Imperial House 
except as its vassals. It is to be noted that in the early period of 
their power the Fujiwara really did govern. The Court established 
at Nara and later at Kyoto was the scene of elegance and luxury, 
but these men took their turn and for four years exiled themselves 
to the outer provinces, spending their time in warfare against the 
barbarians, and in trying to maintain control over the fast increas- 
ing but as yet scattered units who were building up semi-indepen- 
dent baronies which they ruled from their strongholds far from 
the central power and with small regard to its wishes. These 
Goshi, some of them officials themselves, some of them merely 
strong independent men, we shall hear something of later. They 
are to be the framework on which the feudal system is to be built. 

The reign of the Empress Gemmyo (708-715 A. D. ) is 
marked by the discovery of copper in Musashi, a province of the 



116 SAKURAMBO 

Kwanto and in which is situated much of the T6ky5 plain. Copper 
was the coinage of Japan for centuries and a native mintage dates 
from this period. Until modern times gold and silver while a 
basis of currency were but little circulated. The supply of copper 
seems always to have been behind the demand. Holy enthusiasm 
was in one sense a cause, as the many large statues of the many 
Buddhas used up a great part of the metal mined. In Shomei's 
reign (724-748 A. D.) gold was discovered in Tsushima and also 
a great Daibutsu was erected. The statue is one of Japan's great 
works of art as it still stands in- the Todaiji at Nara, and it is not 
without interest to learn that at a fete given in its honour by the 
Empress Koken ( 749-758 A. D. ) it opened its eyes, perhaps on the 
change of manners that was going on around it. Things have 
much sobered down. We are reminded of a passage in Rabelais, 
where Ponocrates for the diversion of Gargantua " thought fit, once 
in a month, upon Some fair and clear day to go out of the city be- 
times in the morning, either toward Gentilly or Boulogne, or St. 
Clou, and there spend all the day long in making the greatest cheer 
that could be devised, sporting, making merry, drinking healths, 
playing, singing, dancing, tumbling, on some fair meadow." So 
we find the Emperor Saga (810-825 A. D.) goes to view the flow- 
ers, and makes the round of the various temples for a similar pur- 
pose and to recite poetry with the priestesses. In Nimmyo's reign 
(834-850 A. D.) there is a similar account of his diversions to 
which are added hunting and fishing, and the Emperor spends much 
of his time away from the actual scene of government which seems 
to have fallen into the hands of officials. All is not smooth, how- 
ever, for two attempts are made on his throne, and brigands swarm 
in the land. On the whole, he is put down by the old chronicle as 
" a good Emperor," and something is made of the discovery and 
present to him of a white tortoise, " a thing so extraordinary that 
all the functionaries went to compliment the Emperor who gave a 
new name period (nengo) to his reign in recognition of the happy 
augury." 

With all this life of pleasure however we are approaching a time 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 117 

critical to the history of these emperors. Montoku (85 1-858 A. D. ) 
had much the taste of his predecessors. His weak health would not 
allow the more boisterous exercise of the chase. He confined him- 
self much to visits among his subjects, and to excursions to see the 
bloom of the cherry-trees and other flowers. With such excursions 
were combined poetry making. There is an amusing episode 
attached to a charlatan priest who claimed that by divine interposi- 
tion he could get along without food. For a time he had much 
credit as a wonder and was lodged in the Imperial Palace, but by 
a very natural process better imagined than described he was soon 
detected and expelled in disgrace from the palace. It is to be 
feared that the people themselves by no means led the idyllic lives 
of their monarchs. We hear much of famines and pestilence, both 
of which seemed to be almost periodical in their operation. Fuji 
also was at this time an active volcano, and in Seiwa's reign (859- 
876 A. D.) there was a very violent eruption, rocks being hurled 
into the sea, and many houses wrecked and people killed. The 
youth of this monarch is to be noted. He was nine years old when 
he ascended the throne, and his successor but one was but eight 
years old. This latter, Yozei (877-884 A. D.) developed into a 
very bad lot. Ordinary libertinage degenerated into the worst 
cruelty, and when he summoned men and women to the palace to 
furnish a mark for his arrows the Regent interfered. Fujiwara 
Mototsune inveigled him out of his palace and quietly carried him 
off. On the unexpected death of his successor, Mototsune set up 
another child Uda (888-897 A. D.) The crafty old man soon 
presented himself with the wish to be relieved of his charges of 
office, and the inexperienced young monarch was naturally only 
too anxious to have him remain and carry on the government as in 
the past. This reducing the Emperor to a mere figurehead how- 
ever makes itself felt. . Rebellion, not unfrequent before, becomes 
almost chronic, and in Shugaku's reign (931-946 A. D.) Taira 
no Masa in the Kwanto and Fujiwara no Sumitomo in lyo were 
only defeated and killed after serious fighting. These two names 
at this period are suggestive. The one as that of the coming rulers 



118 SAKURAMBO 

of the empire and the other as showing that the ruling house was 
losing its solidarity. The throne itself for a long time seems to 
have been anything but a desirable goal. When not forced out, 
the emperors abdicated from choice. Kwasan (985-986 A. D.) 
soon had enough of it. He was an amorous young man with 
three wives, to one of which he was passionately attached. She 
died, however, and one evening the Emperor disappeared from the 
palace. All night they searched for him and the palace was in a 
turmoil. The next day he was found with shaven head in a 
neighbouring monastery. He had turned monk. This was by no 
means an unusual step. It was often taken by the emperors to 
enable themselves to play a real part in the political struggles of the 
time. This of course brought the religious orders into politics, and 
they soon became anything but a means of withdrawal from the 
world to lead a life of devotion. We have said little of the Church, 
not because they did not deserve mention but because they were 
bound soon to compel attention in the annals by some very stren- 
uous deeds. Since Denkiotaishi on Hiesan and Kobodaishi" on 
Koyasan had founded, in the ninth century, their great monasteries, 
these priests had developed into a great military power. As yet 
we hear little of them, but in Go-Shuyaku's reign (1037-1045 
A. D.) the monks of Hieisan raised riot in front of the Mikado's 
palace, a most heinoi^ offence. From that time on they usually 
have a' hand, on one side or the other, in all the disturbances so 
frequent near Kyoto as the central power weakened. There was 
little control over the great barons ruling the outer provinces, who 
fought each other for supremacy with cheerful indifference to the 
interests of the Empire. Fujiwara had -only been too glad to 
depute its duties to outsiders, who building up feudal strongholds 
by conquest of their neighbours had become, in a number of cases, 
powerful chieftains. For twelve years Yoriyoshi and Sadetao 
fought for the supremacy of the great northern province of Dewa, 
with small thought of the central power, and Minamoto Yoriyoshi 
emerged triumphant. Meanwhile the Emperor was diverting him- 
self with flowers and poetry and jewels. 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 119 

The lack of proper timber in the house of Fujiwara finds 
appHcation in Go-Sanjo's reign (1069-1072 A. D.). This Em- 
peror renewed the practice of hearing petitions himself, and his 
successor, Shirakawa (1073-1086 A. D.), although he abdicated, 
kept the power in his own hands. He replaces the Fujiwara as 
actual head of the Government. And so with his successors. 
These make way in order to rule through their sons and grandsons. 
Through custom the Emperor has become a figurehead, and custom 
is all powerful in Japan. The times were marked by great dis- 
order. Barons' wars in the north and west, and fighting between 
the great monasteries around Kyoto. In fact, without Taira and 
Minamoto and the monks of Hieisan, things would have been dull. 
In 1081 A. D. the monks of Hieisan burnt Miidera to the ground, 
and they repeated this operation again in 1140 A. D. Miidera is 
the well-known temple on the hill above Otsu on Lake Biwa, and 
this " peaceful " retreat for religious men fairly represents the 
church militant of the times. We can take a last glimpse of the 
other side of the picture under the reign of Shutoku (1124-1141 
A. D.). He and the former Emperor went to view the spring 
flowers, " many ladies of the court accompanying in carriages ; 
their cortege was very brilliant. With gentlemen on horseback, 
bands of musicians, and many women destined to sing before the 
two Emperors." 

At this point when the existing regime of Court and Emperor 
are about to retire to make room for a very different set of actors 
on the political stage, let us look backward and forward to take 
some account of the men and means which are to supplant them. 
The old patriarchal household consisted, as in most other countries, 
of head, blood relations, and slaves. These last were regarded as 
goods and chattels. They were not as yet attached to the land 
and were a matter of sale and barter. To some extent this class 
was probably made up of such of the aborigines (Ainu) who chose 
to remain on the land with their conquerors, and of Chinese and 
Korean captives. Slaves were also recruited from men who 
through crime or debt or offences against the rulers were reduced 



120 SAKURAMBO 

to that condition. In that rough time the size of a man's household 
had much to do with his safety and importance, and the man who 
collected around his dwelling a numerous band made up of sons 
and son's sons, brothers and their sons, together with the numerous 
slaves needed for the menial work of some large landed property, 
soon became a power to be reckoned with. These landed proprie- 
tors, known as kumifsuko, differ in the amount of their holdings, 
the tendency being for the larger to swallow the smaller. They 
owed no feudal service to the Emperor, although subject to his 
taxation. Their property belonged to them of right and descended 
to their heirs without any additional ceremony of investiture. 
Their own original investiture seems to have been, in many cases, 
of the informal nature of the squatter, although a more formal 
title was later obtained. In fact, they seem hardly to be distin- 
guished from the men known later as goshi, and which in the times 
we have now reached — Taira and Minamoto — begin to play the 
important part. In many cases these goshi seem "to have been offi- 
cials who taking up large grants of land — free from taxation — 
threw them open to settlement on terms naturally much more 
advantageous than the taxed land of the imperial government. 
The peasants eagerly flocked to such cheap land; there was no 
power to check these powerful, almost independent lords, and the 
imperial revenues dwindled to almost nothing. Meanwhile the 
barons with their adherents waxed fat and became a power in the 
land. In other cases they seem simply to have been men, who, from 
natural abilities taking a leading position in their village com- 
munity, acquired wealth, influence, and adherents, by which they 
were enabled to dispense protection to those who were weaker and 
who sacrificed independence to security. It is a distinct instance 
of the almost natural position that a feudal system plays in the 
political development of man, very much at variance with the 
theories of our present degeneration from a condition of ideal love 
and justice as found in primitive man. A love and justice, it can 
be added, which, like that found among the Australian aborigines 
of to-day, was largely dispensed with a club. Now the military 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 121 

force of these early days, and almost up to Tokugawa times, was 
drawn from the general population. A chief led to war the strong- 
est and best of his retainers. His sons and nephews rode by his 
side and the sturdiest of his slaves tramped behind with clubs and 
spears and short swords. There seems to have been but little modi- 
fication of this system except that in time the peasantry became 
attached to the soil and were transferred with it, and slavery in 
name at all events disappeared from the land. 

With the accession of Go-Shirakawa (1156-58 A. D.) civil 
war broke out, in which the two candidates were variously sup- 
ported by the two great baronies, Taira and Minamoto. The 
Emperor de facto found at his side Taira Kiyomori and Minamoto 
Yoshitomo who sided against his clan. Whilst other nobles hast- 
ened to the camp of his opponent, these two great captains provided 
for the defence of the palace. The general breakdown in this 
strife is a source of trouble to the old chronicler. " Father fought 
against his son, relation against relation, and lords against their 
subjects." Ability was on the side of the Emperor and his oppon- 
ents were crushed. Two such men as Yoshitomo and Kiyomori, 
both ambitious for power, could not long get on together. Yoshi- 
tomo soon conspired to get rid of Kiyomori, but was defeated and 
subsequently assassinated by his own relatives. His sons by his wife 
shared the same fate, except Yoritomo, then fourteen years of age, 
who was banished by Kiyomori to the neighbourhood of the 
Kwanto — a most shortsighted procedure on the part of this ordi- 
narily astute man. The beautiful concubine of Yoshitomo, Tokiwa, 
saved the lives of her family and her three children by submitting 
herself to Kiyomori and becoming his concubine. The other 
scourge of the Taira family, Yoshitsune, was one of these children. 
From 1166-1181 A. D. Kiyomori was supreme in the Govern- 
ment, which was filled with his relatives and supporters. 
Towards the end, however, the defeated Minamoto again raised 
their heads. This first revolt was easily crushed, and Kiyomori, 
first burning Miidera as a warning to the monks to keep out of 
politics, sent an army against Yoritomo, who, aroused by his rela- 



122 SAKURAMBO 

tives in the South, had raised an army in the Kwanto. In a 
battle near Lake Hakone, Yoritomo's handful of men were soon 
dispersed, and he himself only escaped through the faithlessness of 
one of his pursuers. He had taken refuge in a hollow tree and was 
found there by this man, who however reported that there was no 
sign of him, and that the opening in the tree was crossed by spiders' 
webs, showing no use of it as a place of concealment. Small events 
sometimes turn the course of Empire, and Yoritomo escaped to 
Awa and set himself to work to rouse the whole Kwant5. Ban- 
ished at the age of fourteen, he was now thirty years old. He soon 
centred a powerful force at Kamakura, and the army sent by 
Kiyomori to break up this camp did not dare to attack him. 
Yoshitsune joined him with all the Minamoto forces he could raise 
in the South, and his cousin Yoshinaka threatened Kyoto close at 
hand. The priestly bands took sides with Yoritomo. Just at this 
critical period Kiyomori died, and the Taira, pressed on every side, 
abandoned Ky5to with the infant Emperor. Yoshinaka marched 
into the city, set up a new Emperor and incidentally himself also. 
This by no means was on Yoritomo's programme, and Yoshitsune's 
effective force soon suppressed him. He was killed by an arrow 
in one of the battles around Kyoto, and this friendly discussion 
among relatives ended with his death. 

Yoshitsune's task ^was by no means ended with breaking up 
Yoshinaka's power in Kyoto. The Taira — or Heike as they are 
better known in Japanese history — had' retreated with the young 
Emperor into the western provinces along the Inland Sea. 
Yoshitsune promptly followed them up and scattered them. The 
campaign was not pressed, however, and he soon returned to 
recruit his forces at Kyoto, and to strengthen his brother's govern- 
ment at that vital point. This done, the third and last campaign 
against the Taira was entered upon. Hemmed in by the forces of 
Kyiishu friendly to Yoritomo, and by Yoshitsune advancing- west- 
ward with his flotilla, they made their last stand near Shimonoseki. 
No compromise was thought of on either side. Taira were greatly 
outnumbered and opposed to the greatest general Japan had as yet 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 123 

produced. In their desperation, however, the battle even showed 
signs in their favour. Yoshitsune is said to have invoked the 
divine assistance of Hachiman, the God of War. More hkely he 
invoked the divine assistance of his heavier battahons and ordered 
up his reserves. The enemy were totally broken. The great 
majority perished in the sea. Many stories are told of the end of 
the little Emperor, Antok. A wanderer for two years, he was 
now but eight years of age. His nurse led him to the side of the 
ship, and bidding him make his prayers to the Gods beguiled him 
with the pretty tale of the beautiful palace beneath the sea which 
they were about to visit, and where his divine ancestors were wait- 
ing to receive him. Clasping his little hands, the Emperor gravely 
went through the ceremonial form of prayer, with all the gravity of 
a child that seemed to pierce the real design of his nurse and which 
his dignity taught him to accept. Clasping him in her arms she 
then jumped overboard and so ended this strife of the Imperial 
houses. But few of the Taira clan escaped. Those who did so 
concealed themselves under other names. They disappeared from 
Japanese annals until Ota Nobunaga, one of Japan's great trium- 
virate, resuscitated the glory of his house and again ruled the 
country. The fate of the victor was no better. Made jealous by 
his brother's success, Yoritomo forbade his approach to Kamakura. 
Of the loyalty of Yoshitsune at this period there seems to have 
been not the slightest doubt. There is a good deal of the court of 
the second Mahmout about old Japan. Yoshitsune's safety lay in 
his own right arm and we soon find the two brothers in arms 
against each other. Fortune favoured Yoritomo and Yoshitsune's 
fleet was scattered by a storm. His army broken up, he fled to the 
north and took refuge with a retainer whom he had reason to 
trust. Urged by Yoritomo, however, this man surprised and sur- 
rounded him. Yoshitsune having killed his wife and children, 
himself committed hara-kiri. Y'oritomo promptly turned on the 
traitorous retainer, and despatching a force against him punished 
him for his misdeed by destroying him and his family and confis- 
cating the fief for one of his retainers. 



124 SAKURAMBO 

Yoritomo was not merely a great general. He was playing 
for higher stakes than simply that of being the most influential of a 
number of vassals. The name was little — or rather was impos- 
sible — but the power was much, and he sought to govern Japan, not 
through the medium of the Court, but directly as by right of his 
position. For this purpose the Court must be eliminated. This 
could not be done directly, for the Emperor was a sacred figure in 
the eyes of the nation. Yoritomo and his successors never tried to 
eliminate the Emperor. Their object was to make him the merest 
figurehead, and this they succeeded in doing. Once permanently 
retired from the active government custom or precedent in Japan 
would quickly fasten the role on the Imperial puppet. With the 
exception of one instance to be mentioned later he now becomes a 
name, even as a fountainhead of honours. All honours are centred 
in the Emperor. They are derived from him, always are derived 
from him ; but in their issuance he is merely the mouthpiece of the 
Shogun's government. In the early days there are signs of rebel- 
lion against this role, but in the rough days of Ho jo and Ashikaga 
such recalcitrancy is met by removal and substitution of a more 
pliant instrument. Most of them are very young, and as soon as 
they reach a reasoning age are removed (abdicate) and are 
replaced by another child. The sacred character, be it added, is 
more and more enhanced. The Emperor soon disappears from the 
scene altogether, and it is said that in Tokugawa times he was 
rarely seen by anyone except his women, communication with the 
Court taking place with the intervention of a screen to conceal the 
majesty of the august Imperial countenance. The history of Japan 
is no longer the history of its emperors but of the ambitious men 
who in turn succeeded in grasping its rule. A singularly uninter- 
esting history, for Japan had no international politics, had no devel- 
opment of a great political or economic system. Up to the time of 
Ota Nobunaga they are admirably instanced b)'^ the history of the 
barons' wars of Stephen's time or the War of the Roses. These 
have their interest in their influence on England's position toward 
continental Europe. No such interest attaches to the intestine 
feuds of Japan. 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 125 

The divinity therefore which hedged about a king and so 
much enhanced his power in Europe had just the opposite effect in 
Japan. It contributed to his personal safety, it took away his per- 
sonal importance and stripped from him all real power in the State. 
Having reduced the Emperor to the position of an hereditary Pope 
without any of the Pope's power, Yoritomo proceeded to consoli- 
date his position. By his " advice," military governors were 
established in all provinces, side by side with the civil governor 
appointed from the Court. These aids " to maintain the 
peace " soon deprived the civil governor of any shadow of power. 
Their appointment lay in the Shogunate and was used simply as a 
basis of the feudal system they built up, and the means through 
which the various fiefs with their obligations of military service 
were distributed. This is so exactly similar to that of Europe that 
details are unnecessary. A great fiefholder subdivided his fief, and 
so down to the retainer who held property and attended the call of 
his lord with his half a dozen men at arms called from their farms 
to fight or fetch and carry. The roughness of the times is well 
illustrated by the story of Sukenari and Tokimune, two brothers 
whose father had been killed in one of the petty barons' wars which 
were an incident of the time. Their father's slayer was in Yori- 
tomo's train and they forced their way even into the prince's hunt- 
ing lodge. They succeeded in their object and killed their enemy. 
It seems to have been almost a general attack. The whole palace 
was aroused, and the two desperate men almost reached Yoritomo's 
presence. Many attendants were killed in this nocturnal fray, and 
Yoritomo himself, roused by the alarm, was only restrained with 
difficulty from taking part in the fray. One brother was killed and 
the other captured. They have gone down to history as the Soga 
brothers, and the monument raised in commemoration of their 
pious act on the Hakone road near Ashinoyu is still an object of 
veneration. A far more significant mark of the times is the 
disappearance of woman. In the days of the Kyoto court she has 
been a prominent feature in literature. Now she sinks back into a 
breeding machine and disappears entirely from public life. In 



126 SAKURAMBO 

fact, the arena of politics and society had no place for a woman. 
Yoritomo's regime lasted but a short time. He was killed by 
the fall from a horse, and if it was the noble beast nine feet high, 
said to have been presented to him, we can understand the serious- 
ness of such an accident. Both his sons were incapable. The 
first Yoshiye was a debauched young man given to pleasure. He 
abdicated in favour of his brother and was subsequently despatched 
by assassins. Sanetomo, as soon as he reached the age of govern- 
ment, was assassinated by Yoshiye' s son. The real power, how- 
ever, had lain since Yoritomo's death in the hands of Ho jo Toki- 
masa, their uncle. No change was made in the regency but a suc- 
cession of Shoguns, partly Fujiwara and partly younger members 
of the Imperial house, succeeded under the power of this able but 
unscrupulous family. 

That the Ho jo ruled with the strong hand is true. That they 
were the first to treat the Emperor and his Court with the greatest 
disregard of any of the imperial wishes is also true. But in this 
they merely led the way, and there is nothing to distinguish their 
conduct toward the Imperial house from that of their immediate 
successors in Ashikaga times. The same problem hardly figured 
for the Tokugawa. In Japan, precedent soon forms a rule, and 
once accepted, the new position of the Imperial house passed into a 
formula of government. In Ho jo times this however was not the 
case, and efforts of the Court to restore the power of the Emperor 
were met by summary removal and banishment. It was only 
toward the end of the period, when, with that peculiar substitution 
or acting through an agent carried to excess in Japanese life, we 
not only have a Regent of the Shogun but a Regent of the Regent, 
that the disorderly feudal barons began again to disturb the peace 
of the home provinces. It was Ho jo Tokimune, however, who 
met the great Tartar attempt at invasion in 1280 A. D. The Tar- 
tars had been already heard from since 1269 ^- I^-- ^^^^ their 
threats were disregarded and the latest embassy was put to death 
to the last man. This was no treatment for the representatives of 
the great Kublai Khan, but he certainly made a grievous tactical 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 127 

error when he sent but a hundred thousand men against the island 
empire. If the necessity had arisen Tokimune could have matched 
easily this army man for man. As it was it was not necessary. 
Storm scattered the enemy's fleet and only thirty thousand of them 
ever reached Japanese soil. Both Japanese and Chinese accounts 
well agree as to this point. They were overwhelmed by the Jap- 
anse and were put to death with the exception of three who were 
sent home to tell the tale. The Italian traveller, Marco Polo, gives 
us the absurd tale current in China as to this invasion. According 
to this account these men were landed without arms on one of the 
outlying islands. Meanwhile the storm raged, and the Chinese 
general to save his fleet weighed anchor and left these unfortunates 
to get along as best they could. Concealing themselves on the 
approach of the Japanese flotilla, they waited until the enemy had 
disembarked and were searching the island for foes. Then these 
Tartars seized the unguarded ships and sailed away, turning the 
tables on their foes. The Japanese king, deceived by the banners, 
admits them to his capital, which they seize and drive out all the 
natives except the women. After undergoing a siege of half a 
year, without hope of succour, they compound with the foe and save 
their lives. 

It is the strange and unknown even in these modern days that 
gives rise to wildest conjectures on which the slightest tinge of fact 
is magnified into detailed accounts of supposed eye witnesses. 
Every unknown country has figured in turn as an Eldorado, and 
Japan is no exception. Although the Khan's letter was couched 
in terms of complaint against Japan's inhospitable behaviour to the 
rest of the world, the real reason for his invasion may perhaps be 
found in the rumours as to the great wealth of the country, rumours 
which we know now were more than absurd. Marco Polo gives 
much information current at the time in China concerning the Jap- 
anese. Some of it very uncomplimentary, and some of it very 
marvellous. One phrase is well worth giving. In fact, his whole 
account as given in Klaproth's comprehensive note is most inter- 
esting, but too long for quotation. " The people are fair, fine 



128 SAKURAMBO 

looking and of gentle manners. . . . They have gold in great- 
est abundance, hence it is here found out of measure and the king 
does not allow it to be carried away; but few merchants come 
here and rarely the ships of other nations. . . . They say, 
who have knowledge of this country, that there is a great palace 
entirely covered with plates of gold, as we cover houses and churches 
with lead, and all the ceilings of the reception rooms and of many 
chambers are of little tablets of pure gold very thick and even the 
windows are ornamented with gold. This palace is so costly that 
no one could even estimate its value. There are also in the island 
numberless pearls, which are red, round, and very large, and worth 
as much as the white, and more. And in this island some are 
buried when dead, and some are burnt. But of those that are 
buried, one of these pearls is placed in the mouth, this being their 
custom. There are also many precious stones." The mineral 
wealth of Japan to-day cuts anything but a figure in the world's 
assets and its present deficiencies are by no means due to exhaustion 
through previous working. 

A house divided against itself will fall, and this seems to have 
had much to do with the decline of the Ho jo. In any case the 
times were beyond them. An exceptional man was needed to bring 
this disorderly period under the rule of his strong hand, and per- 
haps it was necessary that disintegration should advance to such 
an extent as to make its evils felt before such man would find the 
materials ripe to his hand. Meanwhile Ho jo influence had so 
fallen that when for the first time we find an emperor of ripe age on 
the throne — Go-Daigo who became the Emperor in 13 19 A. D. at 
the age of thirty-one years — we also find the court at Kyoto begin- 
ning to raise its head. Once more the Emperor is heard of in 
public life. He receives petitions, relieves the distressed with his 
bounty, which unexpected action is the more enhanced by the 
severe famines which seemed to have become almost periodical. 
Go-Daigo sought and obtained support from the priests. His first 
effort in 1331 A. D. was a failure. He was badly beaten, cap- 
tured, and exiled to the island of Oki. In his place, Hojo Takatori 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 129 

substituted the Emperor Go-Murakami. Go-Daigo escaped and 
the monks rose in his favour. Although these mihtant friars were 
beaten they gave the signal for a general uprising. The forces of 
Nitta Yoshisada and Ashikaga Takauji, acting for the Emperor, 
drove the Kamakura forces out of Ky5to. In 1333 A. D. Kama- 
kura itself fell before the assault of Nitta's army. A great and 
populous city, the once capital of the Empire, is now a little fishing 
village set among picturesque hills by the side of the sea, and 
adorned with handsome temples and the most beautiful statue of 
Japanese art. All sadly out of proportion with its present condi- 
tion. If Go-Daigo had been a very great man or even a mod- 
erately great Emperor, the Imperial house might now have recov- 
ered its pristine glory. He was neither, and failed to rise to the 
occasion. Bound by custom he could only think of perpetuating 
the existing system by the distribution of fiefs among his already 
too powerful supporters. In the quarrel which ensued between 
Nitta and Ashikaga he, perhaps justly but inadvisedly, sided with 
the former. Nitta was defeated ; and failing any longer to protect 
his Emperor, cut off his own head ! The Emperor was captured. 
He escaped, however, and took refuge in Yoshino, now famous 
for its cherry-blossoms. Ashikaga Takauji promptly declared the 
throne vacant, set up a new emperor and for some years the two 
courts existed in close proximity to each other. One change was 
made by the transfer of the Shogunate to the Ashikaga. The real 
centre of the government was again at Ky5to, and the North was 
again abandoned to its own devices at a time when the unruly 
barons of that part of the country most needed a strong hand to 
keep them in order. 

The Ashikaga Shogunate still less than any of its predecessors 
was likely to produce the man fit for the times. Its history is 
extremely uninteresting even if instructive. The country was 
broken up into a number of warring barons. The origin of many 
of these daimyo was in the goshi class. As has been said these 
men, often farmers and adventurers, made themselves a centre of 
influence, and by the process of swallowing their neighbours became 

9 



130 SAKURAMBO 

the masters of the surrounding territories. They had no connec- 
tion with the court, whose adherents without influence or resources 
were in some cases almost destitute. The period of war of course 
had a great influence on the arts of the country. That they were 
kept ahve is simply due to the inherent artistic taste of the Japanese 
people. These rough soldiers would turn from hacking off each 
others' heads to the contemplation of a scroll by one of the later 
Tosa school (strongly influenced in recent times by Chinese ideals), 
to the intricacies of the tea ceremony, to the high moral and martial 
principles of some of the No or dramatic representations which 
were the peculiar delight of this military class. This class had not 
taken that exclusiveness that they did later on. A strong man 
could yet make his way into it, and brains or skill in the use of his 
weapons was as yet a highway to fortune. They have strongly 
ingrained in them all the coarseness that belongs to men who have 
had to make their way by contact with the gross motives that rule 
the struggle for supremacy in this world. To the end they retain 
that coarseness. The whole history of the samurai class, which 
is at this period being evolved from somewhat heterogeneous ele- 
ments, is that of the man whO' is not born to the purple; he is the 
soldier, not the courtier, which perhaps accounts for the incongrui- 
ties of the warrior immersed in the doctrines of justice and benevo- 
lence as laid down in the pages of Confucius and Mencius, and at 
the same time glower^ rapturously at the still gory head of his 
enemy — fruit of his recent vengeance. 

This alternation of savage passion and study of the sages 
typifies the life of the period. The Ashikaga Shoguns were none 
of them great men; but they were great encouragers of the arts 
of the time, and the graver's tool and the manufacture of china and 
pottery became of importance under their rule. It was Yoshimitsu 
who built the Golden Pavilion at Kyoto. It was Yoshimasa who 
built the Silver Pavilion and gave the greatest encouragement to 
all the fine arts and aesthetics of his day. Of the people themselves 
it is probable that they suffered horribly. Famines and pestilence 
were common in the land. A villagfe or hamlet that afforded 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 131 

refuge to an enemy was burnt to the ground as punishment by the 
victor, although the helpless peasant was involved in no fault. 
However, they had not yet become beasts of burden. In fact, the 
general disorder of the times, the loosening of the bonds of author- 
ity, had probably much ameliorated the condition of those of the 
lower classes sprung from the old time serfs. When a man's 
strong arm was of value his individuality counted for much, and 
the peasant was not confined within the iron circle of his caste. It 
would be interesting to know the effect that these constant wars 
had on the ratio between men and women in Japan. Much of that 
influence would be offset by the practice of concubinage which has 
always been a feature of Japanese civilization. Woman's position 
is decidedly lower than under the old regime, and perhaps this is not 
entirely to be attributed to the growing influence of the Chinese 
classics, a particular object of study and admiration to the warrior 
class through its elevation of the dogma of loyalty. Not that other 
means of keeping down the surplus were not adopted, for both child 
murder and abortion were expedients by no means uncommon. 
That in these chivalric days — the days of Bushidd — but little con- 
sideration was shown to the weakness of sex is perhaps not badly 
instanced by a contemporary account * given by an old lady of 
her experiences when a young girl during the uncertain times fol- 
lowing Hideyoshi's death in 1598. They were besieged in a castle 
belonging to their master, and in preference to being present at the 
taking of the castle and being subjected to the brutality of the rude 
soldiery, the women made their escape under conditions of peculiar 
hardship. It is to be doubted if either the honour or the weakness 
of woman received any more consideration in those flourishing 
times than it did from the adventurers found in " our armies in 
Flanders " when a town was taken by assault. 

At the middle of the sixteenth century disintegration had 
reached its extreme limit. A central government could be said to 
be non-existent in fact. In theory, however, its shadow was 

^Translated by Professor B. H. Chamberlain. Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan, 
vol. vii. pt. 2. 



132 SAKURAMBO 

always before men's eyes, and the man had come who conceived 
the idea, not of simply snatching a few square miles of territory 
from his neighbours but of restoring the actuality of the central 
government — with himself of course as the head. Ota Nobunaga 
started his career on very limited means. He was master of a 
small fief in the province of Owari. This he gradually enlarged in 
the usual manner until he was master of the whole province. A 
long, lanky, slab-sided, loose- jointed man, he was a born soldier, 
and as enthusiastic over his men as Frederick the Great. That he 
was a man of no mean political ability was shown in his ambitious 
ideal and the skill with which he selected his agents to carry it out. 
At his right hand moreover was a man who had all of Frederick's 
ability, political as well as martial. A peasant's son named Toki- 
chiro, afterwards known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi. A pretext for 
further extension was found in the march on Kyoto of Imagawa, 
lord of the provinces of Suruga, Totomi, and Mikawa. Nobunaga 
was ridiculously overmatched, but soldiership won the day and 
Imawaga's host was utterly broken. lyeyasu, an inferior daimyo^ 
made terms with Nobunaga and the alliance between them was 
from this time never broken. lyeyasu had Nobunaga's support in 
the North and protected Nobunaga's rear, no light task against any 
attacks from the powerful barons of the North, especially Takeda 
Shingen, of Kai, Uyesugi Kenshin in the Northwest, and Ho jo 
Ujiyasu in the Kwanto. The assassination of the Shogun Yoshi- 
teru by one of his retainers, and the exclusion of his brother Yoshi- 
aki, gave Nobunaga the opportunity to widen his field. He em- 
braced Yoshiaki's cause, marched on Kyoto, scattered the conspira- 
tors, and ruled in Yoshiaki's name as Vice-Shogun. The period 
was one of continual warfare. He first turned his attention to the 
country immediately to the north of Kyoto and crushed resistance 
there. The monks who had made common cause with his enemies 
were the next point of attack, and Hiesisan was practically wiped 
out in fire and blood in 1571. In 1573 Yoshiaki tried to rebel 
against his subjection. Nobunaga deposed him and henceforth 
ruled alone. His next move was against the powerful Mori family 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 133 

who were masters of practically all western Japan. Hideyoshi at 
the head of a large army was sent against the province. Every- 
where successful he sat himself down before Takamatsu, a castle 
on the Inland Sea in the province of Harima. To complete his 
difficult task without the aid of Nobunaga would have been dan- 
gerous, and on the point of victory Hideyoshi sent for him. Nobu- 
naga left his fine castle of Azuchi on Lake Biwa, built on European 
models, and sending his army ahead stopped for a short time at 
Kyoto. In a moment of horseplay he had grievously offended one 
of his retainers, Akechi Mitsuhide. This man, with his supporters, 
left the army on its march, hastened back to Kyoto and attacked the 
temple in which Nobunaga was lodged. Seeing no means of 
escape, Nobunaga set fire to the building and committed hara-kiri. 
In some respects he was an immense loss to Japan. A man of the 
noble class he commanded the respect of his rank. If he could 
have lived for some years, with the assistance of Hideyoshi as his 
minister, it is possible that the succession of a line of Shoguns 
trained under that able and liberal hand might have written the 
history of Japan in succeeding ages very differently from what 
was written. 

The news of Akechi's act soon reached Hideyoshi. Coming 
to terms with Terumoto, lord of Takamatsu, he started for Ky5to 
to punish the assassins. He soon collected a large army, caught 
Akechi at a place called Yodo near Kyoto, and utterly defeated him. 
Akechi escaped, but wandering in the mountains was killed by the 
peasantry and his head brought to Kyoto. Hideyoshi assumed the 
regency for Nobunaga's grandson. There were, however, two sons 
by concubines. These found adherents and there was much severe 
fighting before Hideyoshi settled himself firmly in the seat of 
government. He adopted the policy of Henry V of England. 
Knowing the warlike restless habits contracted by centuries of war- 
fare he directed this restless element on to Korea, and the bones of 
thousands left bleaching across the sea materially lightened the 
task of his successor. Hideyoshi's career has been drawn by many 
writers, and they are practically agreed that he, son of a peasant. 



134 SAKURAMBO 

-was the greatest man that has ever ruled Japan. In like manner the 
greatest king that ever sat on the English throne subsequent to the 
days of the fifth Henry was a commoner — Oliver Cromwell ; and 
the greatest man that ever occupied the throne of Frar.ce was a 
bourgeois — Napoleon Bonaparte. 

,. In his latter days Hideyoshi had but little internal strife to 
contend with. The last recalcitrant was Hojo Ujimasu, and with 
his f^ll the whole Kwanto came into the hands of the central gov- 
erqrn^nt. Hideyoshi turned it over to Tokugawa lyeyasu with 
instruction to move the capital from Odawara to the fishing village 
of, Yedo at the head of Yedo Bay. He died in 1598 without full 
knowledge of the failure of his plans as to Korea, although it can 
be said that he mistrusted the ability or the pertinacity of his suc- 
cessors in carrying them out. His last instructions were to bring 
these troops back to Japan. The guardianship of his young son 
was left to a council of which lyeyasu was the head. This soon 
split, nominally at least over the more or less good intentions of 
lyeyasu as to the regency. With a vastly inferior army lyeyasu 
met the enemy at a place on the Nakasendo called Seki-ga-hara. 
Fortune wavered for a time, but with the aid of a little treachery 
settled on the Tokugawa. From that time, 1600, the government 
of Japan rested in the hands of one family, up to the restoration of 
the Imperial house in 1^67. For fifteen years lyeyasu was busy in 
consolidating his interests which were mainly threatened by Hide- 
yoshi's son and his partisans, but the capture of Osaka castle and 
the death of Hideyori in 1615 put an end to the last pretensions of 
any but the Tokugawa as to the government of the Island Empire. 
Based on precedent the whole of lyeyasu's system was directed 
to maintaining the " status quo " and the supremacy of the Toku- 
gawa family. Any form of innovation was a source of danger. 
His idea was to take present customs, well understood of the people, 
and making an iron frame thereof to pour society into it and allow 
it to stiffen as in a mould. With this rigid unvarying formula, 
errors and weaknesses inherent in individual rulers would be re- 
duced to a minimum. That he did his work well is shown by the 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 135 

test of time, which for two hundred and fifty years maintained the 
working- of the machine in an unbroken period of peace. That he 
was not only a great legist but a statesman is shown by his evolving 
such harmony out of the chaos of interests preceding his time. 
That he had a true genius of perception of the principles lying at 
the bottom of Japanese institutions is shown by the skill in which 
these heterogeneous principles were moulded into one organic 
whole. He found the thread running through them all — loyalty. 
That Hideyoshi was head and shoulders over him is also equally 
clear. ' lyeyasu's system is purely selfish. Paramount to every- 
thing is the Tokugawa family. For that he devised the scheme of 
exclusion of all contact with foreign nations. It is safe to sa}^ no 
such idea would ever have entered Hideyoshi's brain. He had far 
more reliance on himself and on the Japanese people. In place of 
excluding the Spaniard he would have met him sword in hand on 
the soil of the Philippines rather than on that of Japan. Every 
action of Hideyoshi showed that he was for a national Japan. The 
aggrandizement of the individual was to be based on the aggran- 
dizement of the nation. A succession imbued with the ideas of 
Hideyoshi, not cramped by petty personal aims, would have made 
the history of Asia very different reading from what it is to-day. 
This seventeenth century was a critical period in the world's 
history. 

lyeyasu's system, however for what he designed it, was very 
perfect. The great daimyo, Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, were little 
disturbed in their internal government, but the Tokugawa fiefs 
were scattered all over Japan. These subordinate Tokugawa 
daimyo were not strong enough to be dangerous and yet were a 
thorn in the side of their great neighbours and a constant spy on 
their actions. The same balance was kept in the vast fief, the 
personal property of the Tokugawa family. A very strict eye was 
kept over these more personal adherents. They were freely re- 
warded or punished for good government or misgovernment by 
translation to other fiefs better or worse as their conduct called for. 
They were held to strict account in Yedo for the conduct of theii- 



136 SAKURAMBO 

fiefs. On the whole the supervision from headquarters was vigi- 
lant, and the people suffered less from arbitrary exactions under 
the Tokugawa than they did under the larger independent daimi- 
ates, where they were more subject to the caprices and necessities 
of a man who was purposely driven to great expenses by his jealous 
overlord in Yedo. Theoretically, the peasant was amerced in the 
Tokugawa fiefs^ four-tenths of the produce of his farm, although 
this was often raised by forced loans to the lord from the farmers. 
In the independent daimiates these figures in some cases rose to 
eight-tenths of the product. In addition, however, especially 
within a certain radius of the great post roads along which the 
daimyo travelled on their compulsory journeys to Yedo, the exac- 
tions of forced labour of men and horses were most severe. At 
times hundreds and even thousands of men were called on to supply 
transport for the great trains of these nobles. As we have said 
lyeyasu's system was conservative. For this purpose local cus- 
toms were touched as little as possible. On the contrary, every 
effort was made to crystallize them and make them still more bind- 
ing by incorporating them into the code. One great source of 
disorder in the State had been the virile but disorderly men, who 
taking advantage of the times, had forced themselves to the front, 
and to whom changes of the times were their opportunity. This 
element was carefully eliminated by the formation of a caste 
system. The warrior class was now carefully limited in its mem- 
bership. Degradation was possible. Elevation was almost im- 
possible. Peasants, artisans, merchants were carefully limited to 
their own classes. Their rights and especially their duties were 
carefully defined. The personal equation was almost eliminated, 
and abstract justice had as little application to a case arising under 
the code as ever arose under the old Roman law of the Twelve 
Tables. 

What strikes the observer of old Japanese systems is not 
underorganization but overorganization. The Tokugawa did not 
originate this, but simply codified it. The most striking feature 
is the thoroughness with which the people are set to watch each 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 137 

other. The go-nin-kumi, or five family system, is lost in shades 
of antiquity. A village, for instance, was made up of these little 
five-house units, the members of which might be and probably were 
widely separated in the social scale, the system being based on con- 
tiguity alone, and were responsible for the acts of each other. One 
member was chosen as the local representative, these heads of 
kumi selected members for the council, and this council had its head 
or Mayor, often hereditary, sometimes elected, and a survival it is 
considered of the former bailiff of the lord's fief. The lord himself 
was represented by an overseer {daikzvan) who had charge of sev- 
eral villages, and appeal could be made to him if disputes arose 
which could not be settled by the villagers themselves. Usually 
they reached no farther as the overseer was supposed to consult the 
head authorities. However, under certain conditions in the Toku- 
gawa fiefs cases could reach Yedo itself. This seems a very 
efficient system with a broad basis of appeal. Let us see how it 
worked. The last thing intended was that the authority of the 
lord should be sapped by indiscriminate appeal to Yedo. The 
peasants in the case of gross injustice could so appeal; with the 
certainty of punishment more or less severe if they did so. Disputes 
in first instance were to be settled by arbitration. If between mem- 
bers of a kumi by the head of the kumi; if between the members of 
a village community, by the council ; if between neighbouring vil- 
lages, it might reach the daikwan. In some cases even this source 
of justice was polluted or too busy in enforcing the harsh exactions 
of the lord. In such cases the peasants assembled, marched to 
Yedo, and besieged the gate of their lord's yashiki or town resi- 
dence until their petition was received. An appeal to the Shogun's 
Council was even possible, although it meant certain stripes and 
imprisonment. Such an act as that of Sakura Sogoro — thrusting 
a petition into the Shogun's litter — meant death under the crudest 
torture. In this case his whole innocent family were crucified 
with him. Fair as the law reads, I think we can say under these 
circumstances that the right of petition was somewhat limited. 

That much misery was caused by extravagance of the lord and 



138 SAKURAMBO 

oppression of the peasantry, to pay for the extensive competition 
set up in Yedo and fostered by the Tokugawa with the specific pur- 
pose of keeping the daimyo poor, is patient enough from the 
accounts that have come down to us from those still recent times. 
That however an effort was made to administer justice between 
man and man by painstaking officials is also just as patent. The 
fault lay not with them but with the inhumanity of the system they 
had to administer. Some of them exercise all their powers of 
casuistry to soften the harsh code. I will give one instance cited 
by Aral Hakuseki in his autobiography. He was acting as official 
of the Shogun in 171 1,' and the following case was referred to him 
for an opinion. It is typical of the law and its general application 
which is based on duty and filial conduct. A woman whose hus- 
band was missing found a body floating face downward near the 
bank of the river. On appeal, her father and brother refused to 
turn the body so that she could see the face. She then appealed to 
the headman of the village, who turned the body which was that of 
her husband. Circumstances led to the arrest of the father and 
brother. They confessed the crime, and were executed. The 
woman was imprisoned and sentenced to be sold as a slave, on the 
ground that she was guilty of unfilial conduct in informing against 
her father. Hakuseki stood alone in his opinion that the woman 
should be released. He exercises a great deal of casuistry to show 
that such a judgment would involve treason to a lord in favour of a 
father, and took the more specious ground that the woman could 
not have been guilty of unfilial conduct as she did not know at 
the time that it was her husband's body, and that the father was the 
murderer. A harsh code, a harsh interpretation, but at least one 
earnest kindly mind at work to modify its harshness. The woman 
was released and became a nun. 

The practice of arbitration of their differences among them- 
selves was therefore not only encouraged by the Government, but 
was impressed on the lower classes by the harsh if just treatment 
they received if they dared to trouble their superiors with ,their 
difficulties. Hence at a very early period we find the trades settling 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 139 

all their difficulties in this manner, and with the seventeenth cen- 
tury what can properly be described as guilds governed the whole 
mercantile community. We have no idea in these days of unre- 
stricted movement how terrible could be the tyranny of these 
organizations. He who did not submit to the decision of his guild 
became even worse than an outcast, for even the outcasts had their 
organization. He was an outlaw. One in law as well as in fact if 
he left his native place to seek support elsewhere, for no man could 
move without a passport. To spend the night outside his own 
house required the production of the proper papers certifying to the 
legitimacy of his mission. No wonder that under such a crushing 
tyranny the individual became an automaton merely to register, 
mentally and physically, the will of the men in whose hands lay his 
livelihood. The leaders of the guild were chosen, it is fair to say, 
not only for wealth but for ability, but in those uncertain times the 
tw^o were almost synonymous. So strong has been the impression 
created by this early training that it has practically full sweep to- 
day. This paramount importance of the guild had its good points. 
An offence against the avowed rules of the guild, which of neces- 
sity must be based on fair play between the members, enforced 
in their dealings inter se perhaps as much integrity as would be 
found in any other local mercantile community system. That it, 
however, nourished any such ideals as are found in our western 
commercial systems was not the case. It was an integrity simply 
confined not to general principles but to the membership of the 
guild. The guild's rules furnished no ground for fair play in 
dealing with the stranger outside the guild. That in their limited 
scope the system worked well is shown by the great extension 
given to a credit system. But few transactions were carried on in 
cash. Osaka was the great wholesale port and shipped to Yedo, 
the great consumers' mart, tons of produce which was carried by a 
line of junks in almost constant movement between the two points. 
Yedo shipped great quantities of grain from the Kwanto south- 
ward. Districts on the Sea of Japan once or twice in the year sent 
their little fleet with the accumulated produce of the district to 



140 SAKURAMBO 

Osaka as the centre of distribution. Banks and exchange offices 
flourished and all kinds of commercial paper were freely circulated. 
When time came for settlement Osaka or Yedo struck the balance 
and the gold was shipped from one to the other according to the 
debit side of the ledger. There was a very large trade carried on, 
and the men who conducted it were naturally men of no mean 
ability. Apart from any encouragement of the Government to 
settle differences out of court we can understand, although Mr. 
Wigmore seems to think the influence overrated, the reluctance of 
these men to enter those sacred precincts, Avhere at the entrance they 
were required to prostrate themselves on their bellies face to the 
ground, and so humbly drag themselves into the judgment chamber. 
The Tokuwaga Shogunate was a government built therefore 
on force. As we would say in these modern times, it rested on 
bayonets. Let us turn for a moment to the military caste to which 
lyeyasu gave much attention as the important prop of his house. 
The samurai class have no exact counterpart in European life. 
In Europe it was the Nobility and the Commons. The intervening 
class, the Bourgeois, were connected with the latter and most dis- 
tinctly were not men of the sword. Europe reversed the order of 
its Commons and placed the man of brains above the tiller of the 
soil ; a sequence by the way that had tremendous political results. 
The European Noblesse corresponded closely with what in Japan 
was known -as the kuge class of great families attached to the court 
of the Emperor. No matter how v/ide the range between them, 
from a peer of France to a cadet son of an impoverished country 
gentleman who had nothing but his sword for patrimony, they all 
belonged to the same caste. This was by no means the history of 
the Japanese samurai. It did include a large number of men of 
noble family, but its real basis was laid during the adventurous 
times which ushered in the Minamoto Shogunate near the end of 
the twelfth century. For nearly four hundred years it is in gradual 
formation as a class but its elements are anything but stable. It 
is a distinctly warrior class. Its connection is with the Daimyo and 
the Shogun in sharp contradistinction to the kuge grouped around 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 141 

the Emperor. Perhaps in European Hfe the nearest counterpart to 
them are the free companies which in the fourteenth century begin 
to make their appearance in Italy, and to the vigour of whose arm 
and the disorders of the times more than one petty prince owed his 
principahty or duchy, and who rewarded his followers according 
to the plunder he obtained by the aid of these Pretorians. This 
class of men lyeyasu took and formed into a caste whose rules were 
made most severe as their privileges were enlarged. To prevent 
warfare from degenerating into savagery some form of code must 
•exist to govern the relations between the men engaged in it. lye- 
yasu devised nothing new. He simply classified the existing rules 
which were based on a study of the Chinese classics, whose severely 
simple and rational form were especially attractive to a class of men 
who by profession would naturally be little given to speculation. 
Where the adjustment of private differences must be left largely to 
the action of the individual, as even to this day is to some degree 
permitted in the West, it can be seen that if principles of justice and 
right conduct are to rule, and to prevent a degeneration to the right 
-of the strongest, it is necessary to inculcate a code which is gov- 
•erned simply by " esprit de corps." Not the punishment of the 
law is to visit offenders against this code but loss of honour, degra- 
dation from the caste, to which is to be preferred death. Such a 
■code will command a respect that no written law can command. 
Aided by the fact that those to whom it appeals are men under an 
iron military discipline, where unity of thought and purpose is 
•enforced from highest to lowest, it can be seen that each one will 
keep a jealous eye on its infractions. In Japan this code was given 
the name of Bushido. 

The code has had its eloquent expounders. Courage, tender- 
ness for weakness and misfortune, courtesy, unswerving truth, a 
keen sense of personal honour, self-control in the moment of vic- 
tory as in the moment of defeat. All these had their place in 
Bushido. Its philosophy was of a high quality. Its whole tone 
was duty not pleasure. To face the trials and combats of this 
world, not to shirk them by retirement. Its requirement was not 



142 SAKURAMBO 

to temporize or circumvent a difficulty but boldly to face and over- 
come it. Life was a secondary consideration entirely, the accom- 
plishment of the knightly task was the first, the only consideration. 
No one can cavil at the precepts of Bushido. Where it falls to the 
ground, the fatal weakness in its structure to western minds, lies 
in its ideal. Bushido does not fail to take some great moral pre- 
cept as its foundation. It rests on Loyalty. But loyalty to what ? 
To one's lord. To his chief the samurai is to be loyal to the death, 
and only survive him in order to avenge him. In other words, the 
centre of this grand system is made the petty actions and gross 
motives of a man whose interests, material and political, may lead 
to fishing in very doubtful waters. There is no compromise here. 
The faithful samurai can remonstrate if he disapproves of his lord's 
course. He can commit suicide if he is forced to condone what he 
does not approve. But there is no alternative between suicide and 
giving active support to his master when called on. With this in 
mind we can understand the strange incongruities of noblest actions 
and basest crimes performed in the name of Bushido. 

Contrast for a moment the knightly code of Europe with the 
code of Bushido. There is not a single attribute of that code that 
is not found in the western code of knightly honour and duty. 
Courage, benevolence, relief of the poor and distressed, courtesy, 
truth, honour, loyalty, were all a sine qua non to the European 
knight ; but in his ideal there lay a vast difference. His war cry 
was " For God and the King " and he never reversed the order, and 
the good knight never confounded them. It is only fair to say that 
in this he found a valuable supporter in the Church, which no 
matter how it acted in politics and practice always in theory pre- 
sented a very high standard to its followers. Unlike the Church in 
the East — Buddhism — it preached practical religion, not dreamy 
renunciation. Hence the militant idea of the Church, justice and 
mercy between men, ruled over and above the rights of kings and 
princes, and in the end the Church stood as arbitrator of questions 
of moral right and wrong. The result was a class of men who 
were absolutely inconceivable under the Japanese code of Bushido. 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 143 

The knight-errant, passing from place to place, setting up his shield 
with invitation to those who had woes and wrongs to be redressed 
to appeal to his right arm and the Judgment of God. I am not 
noAv speaking of the practice of knight-errantry. That it must 
fall widely short of its ideal was a foregone conclusion. But we 
cannot help feeling a tenderness for it as we listen to its exposition 
from the mouth of its last representative. Don. Quixote has 
already laid the basis of the system in the Golden Age, but it is at 
the table of the Duchess that he expounded the principles and prac- 
tice of knight-errantry, and we can well leave its defence to his 
lips. If it were not for his irregular unbridled temperament it 
could be said that in the Japanese saimirai in action we find more of 
Cyrano de Bergerac than any other European type. Bayard the 
Knight, sans peiir et sans I'eprdche, faithful to his king heavenly 
and earthly, finds no place in the theory of Bushido. 

Much stress is laid on this element of loyalty to prince in 
Japanese Bushido, as if it were an exceptional quality or exception- 
ally developed in Japanese life. To me it seems as if it was due 
more to narrowness of range than loftiness of ideal. Treason is 
an extremely rare occurrence in western annals. There is but one 
instance in American history — Benedict Arnold; for the actions 
and schemes of Aaron Burr were more those of an adventurer than 
of a man meditating wrong to his country. And when we take 
into consideration the history of the times and the divided allegi- 
ance possible under the conditions, the constancy of men and lead- 
ers is surprising. Once their stand is taken they stood by the cause 
through good and evil fortune. In European history we look 
almost in vain for the man for revenge or profit to betray his 
country. Count Julian's name stands practically alone in Spanish 
annals. There was a wide field for such operations in European 
politics. A man had frequent opportunities to turn his political 
coat, and, on the debatable ground where a man hardly knew what 
nationality was, often did so to save his skin if not his property; 
but men clung closely to the political fortunes of their leaders, and 
conquest by the rising States of Europe soon settled boundary lines. 



144 SAKURAMBO 

and wars became national not personal. There is one feature of 
Bushido that necessarily attracts attention. The almost savage 
indifference to life as exemplified in the numerous — one could say 
trifling — occasions from which suicide was the only exit. It seems 
almost impossible that men should have been able to live under a 
system which practically forbade one to take thought of the mor- 
row. And yet they did so, and men do so to-day. Men in Europe 
go about their business and their pleasures, although the intrigues 
of unscrupulous ambitious men may in twenty-four hours call the 
lawyer from his office, the clerk from his desk, and the mechanic 
from his bench, to undertake the uncongenial task of cutting the 
throat of his vis-a-vis across the international boundary. Men dance 
and work and amuse themselves on the top of a mine of dynamite, 
which a spark may explode and make the whole of Europe a battle- 
ground such as has not been witnessed for fifteen hundred years. 

Beauty of thought is no test of civilization. Some of the 
most beautiful thoughts are to be attributed to the savage tribes of 
the North American Indian. Let us turn for a moment to the 
practice of Bushido. That the system is fair to look upon we will 
grant. That it was any better than the system that was and is in 
force in the West we will deny. And that in the day of its glory 
the application was any more vigorous East than West we will also 
deny. Fortunately we cannot blame Bushido for the development 
of Japanese history any more than we can blame Chivalry for the 
many questionable acts done in its day. In both cases history is 
made up in the early days of many acts of violence, alliances and 
intrigues due to most questionable motives, and a disregard for 
the rights of the weak and oppressed, that were the very reverse of 
the principles inculcated by both codes. In Japan as in Europe 
Front de Boeuf was the usual character, not Ivanhoe. Many noble 
characters display themselves in the barons' wars of Japan, but 
violence, intrigue, treachery, assassination, was not only the common 
weapon among political rivals, but often found its way into a man's 
household. Enough has been said as to the actual condition of 
the theoretical heads of the State — Emperor and Shogun — to 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 145 

show that loyalty to them is very theoretical indeed. For a time 
as lyeyasu tightened the hold of the Government over these men 
the interpretation of the code was left to a class better qualified to 
direct its application. As, however, the hand of the Government 
weakened its lack of real moral bases made itself felt, and the code 
of the Samurai as expounded by the lower members of that class 
during the middle of the nineteenth century was anything but edify- 
ing. What are we to think of a code which justifies murderous 
attacks on unarmed foreigners and in one case on a woman ? The 
plea is entered that it was to punish violation of the custom of the 
■country. So much the worse for a country to be guided by such a 
code. If these attacks, if the numerous political assassinations, 
had been made by roughs or by the dregs of the populace, we could 
understand them as due to weakness of the Government and inabil- 
ity to keep order in the community. The Government was weak, 
and the. very men who took advantage of such weakness to engage 
in these cowardly attacks were men who swaggered about " the 
honour of a Samurai." The knight in Europe met his foe face to 
face, weapon in hand. Japanese history is too much a series of 
lying in ambush, hiding under bridges, taking every opportunity to 
rush upon the enemy by surprise and cut him down before he had 
opportunity to resist. Bushido so much heard of at present is a 
regeneration more in the nature of the regeneration of Shinto. 
Not the actual continuance of an always existing spirit of the 
nation, but the revivification of a long lost unity of patriotism 
•dulled for ages by the existence of the feudal system. And such 
a Bushido is worth a thousand times the old loyalty to a petty chief, 
this transference to the nation itself through the symbol of the head 
of the State and. Emperor. But the unbroken sequence seems to 
me to be historically false in the one case as in the other, more so 
in that of Bushido than in that of Shinto. 

There is one other point worth going into in this connection, 
ior it is sometimes brought up against our modern western civiliza- 
tion. How far is it based not on high moral principle but on the 
maxim that " honesty is the best policy ?" That altruism is a 

10 



146 SAKURAMBO 

keynote of the West it is hardly necessary to take the trouble to 
prove, as the history of philanthropy is a standing monument to it. 
But more than that, a very wide spirit of trust has prevailed 
through the community the very extent of which has been marked 
and proved by the efforts to punish breaches of such confidence in 
the public uprightness. Turning to the pages of a great English 
writer. Sir Henry Maine says, " but the very character of these 
frauds shows closely that, before they became possible the moral 
obligations oi which they are the breach must have been more 
proportionately . developed. It is the confidence reposed and 'de- 
served by the many which affords facilities for the bad faith of the 
few, so that, if colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no 
surer conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the 
average of transactions which, in the particular case, have supplied 
the delinquent with his opportunity." Legal honesty among the 
western commercial classes cuts a veiy small figure in the total. 
'The general spirit of fairness in the community is a far more 
important item. You can base this ultimately on utilitarianism if 
you wish, but it can be pointed out that you can also reduce any 
system of morals — even that of Confucius or Mencius, or Bushido 
itself — to -the same basis of Mill's philosophy. And advocates of 
the said systems of morals can equally say, one to another : " Do 
you bite your thumb at me, sir? " 

The comprehensive mind of lyeyasu laid down the broad 
outlines of the system. lyemitsu devoted himself to filling in the 
chinks and crannies through which might filter influences dele- 
terious to the family interest. Not only were foreigners excluded 
from Japan, but the Japanese on penalty of death were forbidden to 
leave Japan, and all vessels were cut down to a size only fit for the 
coasting trade. Ocean traffic ceased. Wrapped up in their isola- 
tion the Japanese developed a wonderfully complete civilization. 
During this peace of two hundred and fifty years their art reached 
a minuteness of detail, and a skilLand certainty in execution of that 
detail, that is marvellous. Philosophy and letters, together with a 
refined but almost grotesque etiquette, filled the time of their upper 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 14.7 

classes. What their Hterature seems to have lacked was breadth of 
view. Turned in to literally feed on itself, forbidden to engage in 
new fields, the virility of able minds turned itself to form. With 
the pomp and finish of an elaborate etiquette carried into the 
minutest details of life there was mingled luxury and extravagance. 
Men who wasted their substance in maintaining great households 
and rivalry in display were little to be feared, and the Shogunate 
deliberately enforced a style of living beyond the means of those 
who might be feared as possible rivals. Only on the lower classes 
was sobriety and frugality enforced. The great nobles were ex- 
pected to uphold their rank with small regard to their revenues. 
These were the days of the magnificent embroidered and brocaded 
robes of which the traveller sees so many specimens, some genuine 
and many manufactured for to-day's demands. The luxury of 
living reached into every crevice of the national life. It was the 
age of decadence, and sometimes developed into questionable paths 
better described in the pages of Juvenal and Suetonius than in a 
book of to-day. It was very picturesque these trains of daimyo 
and their retainers, the minutiae of their tea ceremony and of their 
incense parties, their careful study of the aesthetics of flowers or 
of a garden, their absorption before some masterpiece created by 
comparatively few strokes on the shining silk. No wonder artists 
mourn over its downfall, but any civilization thus turned in op 
itself was bound to decay. Nations, as people, must have the sins 
and shortcomings of others held up before their eyes to realize their 
own. Shut up within themselves, as was the case with Rome and 
with the old regime of France, their system had become ripe and 
had to be either regenerated or amputated. We cannot of course 
compare the brilliant court of the Grand Monarque with the much 
narrower development of an aristocracy as found in Japan. The 
broad life and interests, the gay and malicious wit of the Salons 
seeking food for its intellect no matter at Avhat cost to the future, 
the generous philosophy with mankind for its object, finds no proto- 
type in Japan ; but the old regime in France was too much ahead of 
its contemporaries. It too was turned in on itself to feed on its 



148 SAKURAMBO 

own vices until, by a species of self-poisoning well understood in 
medical science, came first enervation and finally destruction. 

All this luxury at the court of the Tokugawa had of course to 
be paid for and there remained but one source from which to raise 
the revenue — the people. If gayety and extravagant living was the 
rule in Yedo we hear of riots and agrarian uprisings in town and 
country. Professor Droppers tells us that within one hundred and 
fifty years there were twenty-two famines, of which eleven were 
very destructive. We will take some details from his translation 
and that of Mr. Gollier of the report made by Rakuo, Minister of 
Finance under the Shogun lyenari. It refers to the great famine 
of 1783. "The famine made itself felt especially in the North. 
A witness worthy of faith reports to me that of five hundred houses 
of a village thirty only had means of subsistence. The inhabitants 
of the rest had perished." They not only eat cats and dogs, " all 
eat the dead, but, as the bodies of the dead became rotten, many' 
killed the dying, to pot the flesh in order to preserve it longer." 
" A farmer went to his neighbour and said, ' My wife 
and one of my sons have already died from want of food. My 
remaining son is certain to die within a few days, so I wish to 
kill him while his flesh is still eatable, but being his father, I do 
not dare to raise the sword against him, so I beg you to kill the 
boy for me.' The neighbour agreed to do this, but stipulated that 
he should get a part of the flesh as reward for his service. This 
was agreed to and the neighbour killed the boy. As soon as the 
deed was done, the farmer, who stood by, struck his neighbour with 
a sword and killed him, saying that he ' was very glad to avenge his 
son and at the same time have double the quantity of food.' " 
" The cities are to-day full of incendiaries and male- 
factors, for the greater part from the provinces, that misery has 
driven from their villages. If the provinces were not oppressed, if 
they preserved the old family relations, the peasants would not 
come into the towns but for exceptional reasons; when they did 
not find work, they would hasten to return to their homes. But the 
provinces are in distress; all rush to the towns. Driven by an 



THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 149 

extravagant mode of luxury, the princes, the functionaries, the 
rich, put hveries on all these people. Their antechambers are 
filled with a crowd of servitors who do nothing but drink and play. 
The best of these lackeys are content to get drunk and to allow the 
house to take fire; the others steal and set fire to it to conceal their 
misdeeds. The true cause of these crimes is to be sought in the 
carelessness of the masters and their insensate luxury." These are 
not words from the pages of La Bruyere or of Arthur Young 
describing the France of pre-revolutionary days. They are 
describing the great famine of Temmei and the land of Japan in 
the heyday of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Those " happy days " 
of old Japan so lamented by artists. 

After all it is the republican leaven lying at the bottom of all 
of us in the West that has been the salvation of the people. It is 
our heritage from Ancient Rome and our Germanic forbears with- 
out taint of subjection to anything but the pressure of Mother 
Nature herself. It is this spirit at the bottom that has enabled the 
people to carry on their long and persistent struggle against envi- 
ronment. Such a struggle is never a matter of an emeute. The 
short and sharp shock that sometimes takes place at the end is 
really the culmination of centuries of silent effort in which the 
people have never lost sight of their rights. The fight over insti- 
tutions in the Italian cities lasted for centuries before the Com- 
munes were triumphant. They flowered too early and the condi- 
tions of the age were not such as to permit their continuance, but 
the length of the struggle and the former glory of the people 
remained stamped on their minds. The precedent of the past was 
always before their eyes to guide and to justify future efforts. 
And they owed much to the men sprung from their own loins. 
Men who appealed directly to the minds of the people. When 
Cervantes directed his kindly ridicule against the past he not only 
swept the ground from under the old conditions but he brought into 
disrepute its living descendants. " Don Quixote " was a firebrand. 
It was quickly translated into French and English. Italy and Ger- 
many were closely connected with Spain. The influence of the 



150 SAKURAMBO 

book was simply immense, for how could men appeal to the com- 
mon sense of an age so unmercifully laughed out of existence. 
To tell the truth it was nothing but our ancestor worship that saved 
it, and of this Cervantes left nothing but the shell. We have had 
to get a long way off from that age, and it was not until the middle 
of the nineteenth century that we again dared to rear a pedestal 
to medisevalism and the Age of Chivalry. The writers of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries devote themselves almost 
entirely to picturing the life of their own times. And very glad 
are we that they have done so. Japan, unfortunately for her, had 
no Cervantes to point the finger of derisive praise at the unwieldy 
figure of her Smmirai, their exaggerated etiquette, their question- 
able motives, their lack of connection with reality, the incongruity 
of their position in such times of absolute peace; in plain terms, 
no one to show how artificial and unnatural was the whole existing 
system. Japanese writers seem to think that in 1853 affairs were 
approaching a climax even in Japan. Whether a truly popular 
revolution was possible at that date is perhaps a matter of doubt, 
but that the system hurt and hurt outrageously of that there is no 
doubt. We cannot close this lengthy chapter better than by repeat- 
ing the quotation we have placed at the head of it; " and then, 
believe me, pain is a great regenerator of man; and in certain 
cases is a comforting indication of moral vitality, for where there 
is not pain, there is gangrene." 



V 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 

" Per la sua bocca non parlerebbe il furor d'un dio presente nel tri- 
podo ma si bene il genio delle stirpi custode funereo d'innumerevoli 
destini gia compiuti." 

— Roiiiansi del Giglio. 

We have been having a little domestic comedy to add to the 
gaiety of the nations assembled at one of the tutelary shrines more 
particularly devoted to the needs of foreigners at Nikko. An 
American mother of overpowering proportions and authority, evi- 
dently much impressed by the attractions of Japanese girls and 
much alarmed for the virtue of her two sons — aged eighteen or 
twenty or thereabouts — marched on Nikko. Well did she keep 
her eyes (in daytime) on those boys. When the army marched 
she was the rearguard and all defiled in front of her. The boys 
did not care to look at Nesaii who regarded the operations of 
Madame with wonder, not understanding her manoeuvring, and 
seeing " men " treated like children. All this in daytime. Alas ! 
as the shades of night fell and dinner was a thing of the past, as 
the evening progressed evening dress disappeared, and two youthful 
but manly figures disguised in flannels disappeared around the 
corner of the hotel — villageward. Mother sent the boys to bed in 
due season, but I fear they lost their way. At all events they 
managed to scrape up a very tolerable acquaintance with half the 
geisha in the place. The boys were really good company and took 
their mother's hectoring in good part, and without observance 
beyond the bounds of good sense. 

Now this good lady doubtless had heard or read some travel- 
ler's tales which are better put down as springing from misconcep- 
tion rather than exaggeration. That is, they have described the 
facts that came under their observation without taking the trouble 

151 



152 SAKURAMBO 

to go much into their real relation to the public life. The Japanese 
themselves are partly to blame for the wholesale idea foreigners 
get as to the virtue of Japanese women. There is no doubt about 
it that women do not hold the position in men's minds that they 
do in the West. At bottom, no matter how much respect and 
affection a man may have for his womenkind, his ground work is 
the idea of woman as a breeding machine. The western idea of 
woman as man's companion never occurs to him, except as subsid- 
iary to the first basic principle on which to him rests the relations 
of the sexes. Hence up to the establishment of the new Civil 
Code concubinage had a regular standing, and while not recognized 
by that Code it has a practical standing to-day. Now to this 
lowered ideal of woman is to be added the fact that in daily life 
less mystery is thrown about her person. Climate and life in the 
Japanese home do not conduce to that ultra-development of privacy 
so conspicuous a feature in western home life. Not that the Jap- 
anese woman is a whit less pure and modest thereby than her 
western sisters; but there is a difference of standard in reference 
to acts of necessity, particularly in conversation, and to which free- 
dom of reference being accustomed from childhood she sees no 
offence in its due place. Again, the Japanese marries very early in 
life, and marriage to him is by no means the formality it is in the 
West. He is not restricted in his relations to other women as in 
the West, where the contract is supposed to imply chastity on the 
part of both man and woman in their future married life. This is 
only implied on the woman's part and lapses from it among Jap- 
anese married v/omen are rare. Also, the Japanese have carried 
on from their ancient system the custom of licensing public women. 
This system, while akin to certain systems in force in Europe for 
the regulation of vice only, carries the resemblance on the surface. 
Where women were so severely guarded and had no public rights 
or means of support outside the family, it is not hard tO' see that 
she could not be held responsible for lapses from virtue of which 
there was but little opportunity. Lapses of virtue in the wife, who 
was the only woman with any degree of freedom, were punishable 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 153 

with death, and the husband could take the law in his own hands. 
The girls, therefore, that filled — and fill — the brothels of the 
Yoshiwara and the pleasure quarters of the large towns were not 
women who had made a " mistake," or women of depraved moral 
character, but mainly were women whose means of support had 
failed them or their families, and whose only resource was to sell 
themselves to a life of shame. It takes courage to take the only 
other remedy left to them — suicide — but many did, and do to-day, 
take that course in preference. Where the relief of necessitous 
parents is concerned such course would not be open, for the first 
duty is to their parents, no matter at what cost, and many a romance 
has been woven around the Yoshizvara in this connection. Unfor- 
tunately the excuse of such necessity is often to keep some miser- 
able old man in his daily allowance of " rum." The consent of the 
girl is supposed to be obtained before they enter on such a life, 
but they are sold as a rule very young, at sixteen or seventeen, and 
the value of the implied consent in such cases does not amount to 
much. Advantage is often taken of the Imperial Order allowing 
them to abandon all such contracts at pleasure, but the Courts have 
thrown safeguards around the brothel-keeper, holding the girl still 
liable for the money loaned. As she has no other means of paying, 
and the brothel-keeper can come down on her parents, the result 
can be imagined. There is also a police regulation that the brothel- 
keeper must sign the release, and although presumably he can be 
forced to do so, he can put obstacles in the way and gain time to 
bring every kind of pressure on the girl. It is hardly necessary to 
say that the women found in the Japanese brothels are a very differ- 
ent class from the tough, drunken, and obscure creature that plays 
the same role in Europe and America. The Joro naturally has no 
credit even in Japan, their lives being passed amid degrading influ- 
ences, but the veil of charity is thrown over them by pity for the 
motives which lead many of them to such a life. Where her 
motives are respected, and where she is carefully protected against 
the vices of a licentious life, particularly drunkenness — for the 
police supervision of the brothel-keeper is severe on such points — • 



154 SAKURAMBO 

she can retain much of the charm of her womanhood, her grace and 
gentleness of manner. An exception is to be made in reference 
to the former treaty ports. If the prostitute of the western stamp 
is found anywhere in Japan it is in those ports and in places fre- 
quented by Europeans. It is a curious fact, and the reverse of 
" complimentary " to the advanced intelligence of the European, 
that as one approaches the beaten track the women servants give 
place to men performing the offices usually turned over to " elder 
sister " (nesan). Local writers handle the subject rather daintily, 
but I think it can be said that the European Japan has been made 
so by the European himself. Concubinage, unfortunately so prev- 
alent, casts a shadow over the Japanese woman, as foreigners get 
the impression that unchastity is the rule and not the exception, and 
encounters in inns and gay tea-houses fosters the idea. Vice as a 
rule is strictly localized by the police, but a good deal must be 
wink-ed at. It is safe to say that the accommodating woman found 
in the less reputable inns is not one of the inn girls at all. In 
Japan, as elsewhere, the line is drawn hard and fast and those who 
do not seek the girl of easy access do not have her thrust upon 
them, but when they do seek her a licensed woman is readily 
obtained to meet the demand. Many women are so licensed or are 
connected with tea-houses in places too small to make worth while 
to maintain an official pleasure quarter. It is not safe to judge 
Japanese women by the Yoshizuara standpoint or the tea-houses of 
the summer and health resorts. One is quite likely to land in 
serious complications, or bag and baggage in the street, if such 
preconceived ideas are acted on elsewhere. In a respectable Jap- 
anese Yadoya, and at the tourist resorts to which foreign residents 
and their wives and children go in the summer season, any laxity on 
the part of nesan if known — and they always hunt in couples — 
would mean instant dismissal. This is based on the legal licensing 
of prostitution. Any house or hotel in which it is illegally prac- 
tised can be closed for two months on simple police order. Nesan 
is a capital hand at a bargain. Her parents have apprenticed her 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 155 

for a term of years to the hotel, and during that time she carefully 
regards their interests. And besides she is a good little girl. 

Nikko is a charming place to rusticate. At its social best 
in August and early September; its physical best in October and 
early November. In the summer it is very rainy, and one must 
acquire web feet, an absolute indifference to getting soaked 
through, and a stock of ancient garments. The clouds were hang- 
ing over Nantaisan on the morning when I started for Lake Chu- 
zenji, a favourable prognostic according to the local weather 
sharps, as the prolonged wet spells usually come across the range 
which lies seaward. From preference I took the upper road as far 
as the Dainichido garden, passing over the site of what was once 
one of the prettiest spots in Nikko. There is still some beauty in 
it, especially when the azalea is in blossom in early July. x\mong 
the many disastrous rises of the Daiyagawa that of 1902 was one 
of the worst. It had been raining for days and the Lake was 
sending a cataract over the Kegon fall. A great landslip from 
Nantaisan sent a tidal wave down the valley, sweeping away every- 
thing in its path. The Dainichido, situated on the brink of the 
river near Nikko, was devastated, only one of the little temple 
buildings escaped ; but farther down, houses were swept away and 
the inmates with them. The cjuaint little Buddhas of Gamman-ga- 
fuchi were terribly banged about and the sacred bridge went down 
under the flood of waters carrying away everything below by the 
impact of its heavy timbers. This lower road along the river 
always goes to pieces during these freshets, and is always patched 
up again in the same spot to have the experience repeated. Why 
the upper road is not developed on the fairly level ground there 
afforded is one of the mysteries of the local engineering corps. 
This part of the river valley while pretty is decidedly common- 
place. It is not until the Ashio road is left behind at Futamiya 
and we advance up the gorge that the scenery becomes striking. 
Most pedestrians take to the short cuts on their way up the moun- 
tain. This I think is a mistake, for all the fine views down the 
valley and the towering mass of Nantaisan on the right are missed. 



156 SAKURAMBO 

Just before reaching Naka-no-chaya, the view is obtained of the 
great cleft reaching almost from the summit of the mountain to 
the bed of the Daiyagawa, and is well worth the long curves of 
the ricksha road. The change to the level of the little plateau 
lying between Nantaisan and the head of the lake is very sudden, 
and all sense of being in the wilderness of the Japanese central 
mountain range is cut. off and one could well imagine oneself taking 
a woodland walk on the plains below so thoroughly are the sur- 
rounding slopes screened by the trees. If one walks a hundred 
feet back of the Kegon tea-house a fine view is obtained down the 
valley we have been climbing for the past few hours. This is a 
magnificent splash of gold, yellow, and red, in early October when 
the trees of the higher elevations take on their autumn tints. A 
good deal of this is due, not to the trees but to a creeper very 
common all through these woods and which takes a fine red colour. 
Modern times have sadly stripped the gods of their powers. 
Among the numbers of people we have passed or who have passed 
us on the mountain there are a goodly proportion of women. 
Some tramping sturdily along, for the Japanese woman is no mean 
pedestrian. Others carried in kago, the favourite means of con- 
veyance of the native among the mountains even when ricksha is 
available. Now Nantaisan is a very holy mountain. Most moun- 
tains are holy in Japan, and this Futaara shrine one of the holiest. 
Up to very recent times women were forbidden to climb the moun- 
tain, and they could only view it from the level of the lake, a 
proceeding which most of them are very sensibly satisfied to do 
even at this date. There is no royal road to Nantaisan, which is 
regarded as a most fatiguing climb from the steepness of the path 
and the great number of steps making the grade still more severe. 
In ancient times we could believe the prohibition still more rigorous 
and their presence even on this lower slope of the mountain not 
admitted. That is, if we can believe the following veracious 
legend. Many, many years ago, a little nun belonging to the 
Futaara shrine at Nikko made up her mind possibly that since so 
many men found something to see on the slopes of Nantaisan there 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 157 

must be something there she would hke to see too ; and perhaps find 
out by a personal interview whether the god to whom she had 
devoted her services was really such a woman-hater as he had the 
reputation of being, or whether the prohibition laid on her sex was 
simply another device of selfish man to keep the key of the closet of 
good things to himself. A view doubtless supported by the gay life 
of her ecclesiastical superiors of those early days and going on 
under her own eyes. At all events, tucking up her kimono care- 
fully out of dust's way until only the red underskirt formed her 
outer conspicuous garment, and with her broad pilgrim's hat and 
a staff she started on her long climb. Intentions doubtless count 
for much — faith as well as works. Our little nun was a kagura 
dancer — one of the sacred temple dances is called by that name — 
but while her little feet were skilled in the sacred measure they had 
had little practice in walking. In time, therefore, she grew very 
tired, and when she had climbed the mountain and reached the spot 
just opposite where now the bridge crosses to the Lakeside Hotel 
at Chiizenji she stopped to rest. Here was the god's chance to 
punish this outrageous intrusion on his shrine. At once she was 
turned to stone, and there she sits yet, a plain and palpable proof 
of the legend, safe from storm and rain, and ensured an eternity 
of fame far beyond the ephemeral existence of Lot's wife. The 
proof of the legend is certainly ad hominem. There the maiden 
is, and the only thing that carping critics could bring against the 
veracity of the tale is the fact that the village is supposed to have 
existed and prospered some eleven hundred years now, and even in 
Japan a village cannot exist and prosper for a much shorter time 
without the due proportion of the fair sex. 

Let us try to get some idea as to what this religion is that has 
led our little nun to take such fearful risks involving her undoing. 
It is no easy matter to get at just what is the condition of the Jap- 
anese mind regarding religion. Every religionist colours his views 
according to the cult that he professes. If you are to believe the 
Buddhist, then the supremacy of the creed of Shaka Muni is 
unquestioned. With no little reason they point to the many 



158 SAKURAMBO 

temples sprinkled over the land, and to the priests engaged in their 
service. To them there is no cause to bestir themselves. Their 
opponents on the contrary, especially Christian, say that Buddhism 
is a dead creed in the country; that it has remained behind with 
the ideals of the past ; that it has not kept pace with the expanding 
of the Japanese mind; that it has no real life and only needs a 
push to send the whole structure to the ground. In the early part 
of the eighteenth century much was heard of Shinto, the original 
cult of the nation and which had dropped into oblivion before the 
effective organization of the Buddhist propaganda. There is but 
little argument as to Shinto now. Its polemics have dropped out of 
sight. But this mainly because Shinto as the national cult has 
triumphed. There was no contest of supremacy in the nation at 
large. Some commentators in studying the ancient books chose 
to ask the question does Shinto still live in the hearts of the Jap- 
anese people, and the answer was unanimous, for it was not so 
much a question of religion as a question of national identity and 
once understood the answer was a foregone conclusion. Now 
Shinto in one sense is Nature Worship. There are gods without 
end, enough to cover all the phenomena that has come or is likely 
to come to man's knowledge in the future. Whether eight hun- 
dred or eighty or eight myriads of them is a matter of little im- 
portance, for the term " myriad " is very elastic and they are 
always growing. But the important point is that the basis of the 
system is Ancestor Worship. All these gods and goddesses are 
directly connected w^ith the genealogy of the Mikados. This is so 
much the case that one is somewhat led to doubt whether there has 
ever been a genuine nature worship in Japan, entirely free and 
independent of this Ancestor Cult. The cut-and-dried genealogies 
however of the Kojiki and Nihongi are so obviously a compilation 
made for effect that one can just as well attribute their nature to a 
readjustment of an old nature worship lost in the mists of time as 
to take the ground above that Nature Worship has sprung from 
Ancestor Worship. Whichever way it is we have at the dawn of 
history a cult which embodies both elements but of which the 



THROUGH KOTSUKE ' 159 

Ancestor element has taken the predominant position. To the 
Chief of the Nation is attributed a divine ancestry, and an elaborate 
genealogy has been worked out which is made the basis of the body, 
politic and religious. But the deification by no means stops there. 
As the Chief of the Nation rules by right divine so the chiefs of 
the tribes are of divine origin, younger cadet branches of the 
Imperial house. The same allegiance that is owed by all to the 
head of the nation is owed by the tribe to its individual head. It 
is to the deification of these chiefs after death that most authorities 
attribute the origin of the local gods, the U ji-no-kcimi, and the 
centre of the tribal worship was the temple raised in honour of 
the common ancestor, and probably at the time its worship was 
■confined entirely to the members of the tribe. In fact, at that 
time habitat was very restricted and the dwellers in a district were 
related by ties of blood, a condition of affairs moreover which in 
some places has lasted down to the present day. In course of 
time there was change. With the development of a feudal system 
in place of a family system fiefs were often changed and chiefs 
removed to distant parts of the country. Great care was taken to 
maintain the cult of the U ji-no-kami which had now become the 
local divinity, and whose worship now included many not connected 
in any way as members of the tribe. The last stage was when the 
U ji-no-kami became confounded with or merged into a local 
Nature God, always be it remembered retaining as basis his right 
to worship as an Ancestor and so confounding the two forms of 
belief — Nature and Ancestor Worship — as to prevent the develop- 
. ment of any idea of a god as apart from the ancestral cult. 

Now in ancestor worship the most important feature is the 
maintenance of the family line, the necessity of an heir male to 
continue the family worship. Woman has always been excluded 
from exercising the higher religious rites of the cult. Also she has 
been regarded practically as a chattel. When she leaves the house 
to go to her husband she also leaves the family to become a 
member of her husband's family. Only under certain circumstances 
does she play any part in relation to the family worship and that 



160 SAKURAMBO 

is when through lack of heirs male a stranger is adopted into the 
family for the purpose of marriage so that her issue may continue 
the hlood line in the worship of the ancestor. Every Japanese 
house has the kamidana or god shelf where the mortuary tablets of 
the family ancestor are placed and before which offerings are made. 
This in itself would be evidence that the basis of the Japanese 
system is Shinto. Many Japanese are Buddhists. All are Shinto- 
ists. It is not so much a belief in dogmas — for Shinto dogmas 
may be said to be non-existent they are so very shadowy — as a sym- 
bolic representation of the unity of the race, and it is as such that it 
has such strong hold to-day on all classes of Japanese. The intense 
earnestness of this religious feeling among the Japanese does not 
seem to have attracted the attention it really deserves, although the 
evidence of it is continually under one's eyes. This is to some ex- 
tent due to the relationship existing between the worshipper and the 
God. He is the god of the race, not a universal god. There is just 
as much fierce pride of possession in the gods as in the old 
exclusive cult of Jehovah among the Israelites of old, a race by 
the way to which the Japanese have no little resemblance. The 
Japanese god, however, is not a being apart from and above all 
mankind. To them the universe is Japan, and they have never 
extended their cult to take in a wider range than it did in the times 
when the race first appears in history. The Japanese therefore 
approaches his god as in times past he approached his chief, humbly 
and reverentially but with a feeling of the blood tie that exists 
between them, and that he feels most intensely. Mr. Lowell, in 
his " Occult Japan," has described their " hypnotic possession " of 
which the race make such a practice, and the very extent of which 
is the best of evidence as to their intensity of feeling. As a Jap- 
anese writer has described it, they always feel the presence of the 
kami. They are as much a part of the land as the living and 
surround the living on every side, entering into all their pleasures 
and griefs. So much for the daily practice of religion; but for 
the future they turn to the developed Buddhistic philosophy. 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 161 

Here they have something far more tangible to grasp than anything 
that Shinto can give them. 

From the very earhest days the importance of worship has 
been emphasized by Imperial edicts. Shinto to-day is the State 
religion and thoroughly believed by the great mass of Japanese 
who, it is safe to say, are as confident that their ancestors were 
present at the Battle of Tsushima to encourage their descendants 
and throw confusion and terror into the hearts of the enemy, as 
when the Tartar horde of former days descended on the shores in 
the days of Ho jo Tokimune. But we ourselves worship our ances- 
tors. We are as much concerned to-day to uphold the name they 
have handed doMm to us as if we had invested them with all the 
attributes of the Japanese Kami, and among the upper classes of the 
western world it is far more fear of disgrace brought on the family 
name than fear of religion that upholds the social code. Some 
old moss-covered blurred slabs have more influence than the church 
under whose shadow they rest. An ancestor worship, properly 
speaking, is pride of race. The intolerance of race is well known, 
and the long seclusion of the Japanese have intensified racial feeling 
among them to an extent that western Utopianism with its brother- 
hood of man — and which we sometimes hear expressed among 
Japanese — will never break down. They are a peculiar people, 
made so by their physical and political isolation; just as the 
Hebrew of old, made so by his religious isolation. There is an 
interesting feature in the rituals used by the Shinto priests. As 
in so many religions, they have become unintelligible with the lapse 
of time. Of course once they had a meaning, but much of it is lost, 
even to the priest who recites it much as many an ignorant monk 
of the middle ages mumbled his Latin prayers. The latter, how- 
ever, always admitted of an interpretation elsewhere, if the Frere 
Gorenflot of the occasion could not master its meaning. The 
Shinto formula, however, often only admits of endless controversy, 
the choice of whose interpretations is a matter for the commentators. 
There is another form of Japanese religious feeling among the 
lower classes, and that is the grossest superstitions. Nothing of 



162 SAKURAMBO 

importance is done without the interposition of the priest who deals 
in charms of all kinds, whether to catch a thief or a husband, for 
defence against disease or against a ghost. Charm books and 
almanacs govern the course of any undertaking, and unlucky days 
therein marked are carefully avoided. Shinto has built up an inter- 
esting folklore around it. It is childish and crude compared to 
the folklore of the West. For instance, Jason and the Golden 
Fleece and the beautiful myths found all through Homer. It deals 
much with wonderfully strong children found in unusual places^ 
of strange transformations of spirits good and evil into human 
shape, and the number of ghost stories are uncomfortably large. 
The Japanese child gets his fill of Bake Mono San (Honourable 
Mr. Ghost). The fox among animals especially fills an unpleasant 
role in his pranks and " possessions." They are reticent about it, 
and it takes some little time to find out that many of the lower 
classes (particularly women) avoid the Yokohama Koyenchi 
(park) on account of a fox which is supposed to haunt it at night. 
Whether one leaves the Lakeside Hotel by the pretty shaded 
road which follows all the windings of the lake or pushes on by 
boat to Shobu no liaina near the upper end, the first striking feature 
to meet the eye is the scarred track of the great landslide of 1902. 
This stretches from just below the upper third of the mountain to 
the base, spreading out fan-shaped to a width of over a hundred 
yards. The temple buildings stood in the track of the slide and 
were crushed and buried beneath it. There was warning of the 
danger and there does not seem to have been loss of life, although 
the native on that point wavered somewhat between plain igno- 
rance and the wish to adorn a tale. The uncertainty left in the mind 
is somewhat akin to that of the elder Mr. Weller after his upset 
in driving down to Eatanswill. He found the old gentleman's hat, 
but was uncertain whether or not the owner's head was in it. 
This experience with the mountain, however, has been taken as a 
warning, and advisedly if the palpable signs of landslip seen else- 
where are any indication of the frequency of this occurrence. The 
temple has been rebuilt on the opposite side of the lake and 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 163 

standing on the shore under its torii is had one of the finest views 
of Nantaisan across the water that can be had anywhere on the 
circumference of the mountain. A Japanese temple usually implies 
a view. This is so much the case that the temple forms part of the 
mise en scene, and the exquisite harmony between it and its 
surroundings arouse the admiration of everyone who visits this 
eastern land. Noav we can admit the genius to which its develop- 
ment is second nature, but after all scenery is not architecture 
and taking the temple out of its environment the result is disastrous. 
The origin of Japanese temple architecture is referred by competent 
authorities to the native hut or house, its main features being 
economy of space and beauty in the curved lines of the roof. As it 
was nearly fourteen hundred years ago, so it is to-day, with little 
change except as to the decoration with which Buddhism in some 
cases has loaded it. Now it is the idea that is back of the temple 
that influences its development, and it has been the Japanese idea 
of these Kami^ of these forefathers of the race, the domesticity of 
their cult, that has directed its external form. Their gods are their 
kinsmen, the most recent of these hardly being any more removed 
from those of the race now walking the earth than the freshest 
canonization emanating from Rome. We have no record of such 
an influence in our Aryan mythologies. Traces there are indeed 
of ancestor worship in all religions and they are found in the my- 
thologies of Greece and Rome, and in the latter influence private 
worship down to the latest days of the Empire. The hosts of 
heaven are peopled with progenitors of their kings and heroes, but 
such members of the celestial hierarchy play always a subordinate 
part. There is no bond between the great gods of the Indian, the 
Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman mythology, and 
their worshippers. They are beings apart entirely from the human 
race. Man to them is their sport and plaything. Hence, even if 
the gods were endowed with many of the malicious frailties of men, 
and of which men's misfortunes seemed to imply the existence, the 
feeling inspired was one of awe and fear, and such feeling would 
seek expression in the architecture and rites of the temple where 



164 SAKURAMBO 

such gods were worshipped. Placing God so far beyond him and 
outside of him, the rehgious man of the West has developed a cor- 
responding architecture, as far in advance of the East as the idea of 
an extra-human God is in advance of ancestor worship. And 
mark that it is the idea that influences here. That the nearer it 
approaches to unity, the greater the concentration of its architec- 
tural development. The Greeks worshipped many gods it is true, 
but in the grandest age of Greece — the age of Pericles — the idea 
at the root of all Greek philosophy was the unity of the universe 
as they knew it and of which they were seeking an expression. 

In fact, whenever we find religion based on that idea of unity, 
a religion trying to seek in its esoteric expression a formula to 
explain that universe by a single first cause we find a great temple 
architecture. The great Assyrian temples of Bel and Ishtar at 
Nineveh and Babylon, of Isis and Osiris at Thebes and Memphis, 
the Parthenon at Athens, Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome, are all the 
expression of man's idea of the power in whose hands he felt lay 
his fate. The position of Christianity was peculiar. A new 
development of an old religion on hostile soil, it naturally rejected 
the architectural form of that religion. In some ways the basilica 
■ — a development itself of the Roman house with its cdrium — has 
influenced early Christian architecture, but it soon found this unsat- 
isfactory and broke into its own lines. These were to some extent 
modified by the introduction into the old Hebrew idea of Unity of 
the Godhead of the mystic idea of a Trinity, which, with the devel- 
opment of " Mary Worship " and worship of the Saints, necessi- 
tated chapels adjunct to the main church and radically influenced 
the architecture. Therefore Christian architecture has never 
reached the beauty of the Greek ideal which after all was essen- 
tially single in its basis. Temple architecture is racial just as the 
Church is racial, and in so far as the western mind has raised the 
ideal of an awful omnipotent first cause as God, and sought to 
express that awfulness and beauty in wood and stone, so it has 
gone beyond those nations who have confined their speculations 
within the range of their immediate environment; and as these 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 165 

always lived in the past, made the past their ideal to which the 
present must conform, so their architecture conforms to the same 
primitive belief. This tyranny of the past has wrapped the Far 
East in swaddling clothes. After the first enthusiasm over Buddh- 
ism had worked its effect the land sank back into its numbing 
sleep. There was none of that fermentation of ideas, that hetero- 
geneity to which the West owes so much. Their renaissance of 
faith was of the nature of scholastic disputes, rather than such as 
inspired Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries to cover 
the land with magnificent cathedral churches. The practice of 
Christianity in requiring frequent worship of the people en masse 
necessitated the presence of the Church as near the centre of popu- 
lation as possible, and which can account for the fact that natural 
surroundings do not play the prominent part that it does in the 
setting of the Japanese temples. This however has not always 
been the case ; in many western countries it is not the case to-day, 
and everybody knows the care and thought the architect is expected 
to give to the question of making the best use of environment. In 
ancient days this was carried to a great extreme, as the picturesque 
and harmonious surroundings of many an old French and English 
Abbey show. It would be a bold man to say that the ruins of 
Furness or Fountains Abbey in England were out of harmony with 
their surroundings. There are few finer scenes than the latter as 
viewed from the distance. Beauty in this pile is not dependent 
on its surroundings. Milan cathedral, that beautiful monument in 
white marble of man's devotion to an idea, would be quite as 
harmonious amid a setting of Nature as it is in- the streets of the 
great city which lies around it and worships in it. Exquisite as is 
the decoration of the Nikko temples, will anyone seriously rate 
them as equal to the Sistine Chapel or the Pope's Apartments in the 
Vatican. The one the work of Michael Angelo Buonarotti, the 
other of Raphael Sanzio? Is there any music to be found in the 
Japanese liturgy to compare to that poured out by the grand 
organs of Europe? After all architecture is a question of mathe^ 
matics and mechanics. It is the work of men's hands, and one 



166 SAKURAMBO 

will hardly seriously compare the Nikko and Hongwanji temples 
with the Duomos of Milan and Florence, of Amiens, Cologne, 
Burgos, Toledo, Lincoln, or Salisbury most graceful of English 
temples. They are not comparable. Nikko has the beauty of one 
of the jewel boxes of Cellini ; Milan, Florence, and Rome, possess 
not only the beauty of Cellini but the grandeur of Michael Angela. 
Japanese religious architecture is exactly expressive of the people 
themselves. For generations their ideal has been limited in its 
general outlines. All their force has been expended on the elab- 
oration of detail. One turns away from Nikko with a feeling of 
dissatisfaction, a feeling that it does not express the fulness of a 
great idea such as is found in the temple architecture of India, of 
the Moslem races, or the cathedrals of Europe. As a mausoleum 
it is exquisite. As an expression of faith, infinitely finite. 

As we push a little further on into the lake a break in the 
mountains is seen on the left. This is the Asagatatoge, a pass 
which leads across to Ashio and the Akagi range of which more 
anon. Sufihce it to say here that a very indifferent footpath leads 
to it and that a fifteen minutes' climb to the top gives a beautiful 
view, particularly on the lake side. The path on the other side 
leads down to Dozan or the mining town at Ashio. Mining towns 
are usually what can be called " tough " and Dozan is no exception 
to the rule. It is quit% refreshing to find this touch of universal 
nature. It — and some few other things — reminds us that our 
Japanese hosts are part of the human race after all. The general 
term of address elsewhere in Japan to the foreigner is Jinsan, which 
as a term of reproach is of the mildest character. D5zan, how- 
ever, never reaches such a point of etiquette. Jin is as far as its 
higher education has gone, and the commoner term as the stranger 
wanders along its long and dirty street is ijin and tojin or ke-tojin, 
which according to the animus of the speaker can be translated 
" barbarian," " hairy barbarian," or " foreign pig." The plant 
of the copper company is a very extensive one. Concentrators, 
smelters, reverberatories, tunnels driven in every direction into 
the bare hillsides, the shriek and rattle of the mine trams, the hard, 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 167 

sullen faces of the people, and the reign of absolute ugliness set 
Dozan apart as a mining town. Just as other mining towns else- 
where bear their characteristic marks. Below the town of Ashio — 
the secular portion of the settlement — is the filter plant to filter the 
mine waters. These have given much trouble to the farmers below 
who have sought redress from the Government and Diet in Tokyo, 
rather than by damage suits or injunctions from the Courts, a 
usual procedure in the West. Filtration has been adopted as the 
remedy. The agitation was carried on with the usual exaggera- 
tion, there being no particular reason to believe that affairs were 
worse than they had been for years, the sudden cry of danger to 
health, of those living below on the river being rather specious. 
The fact that no effort had been made, however, to remedy the 
evident disadvantages of such a careless system as running the 
mine waters direct into the river seems to show that remedial 
legislation in such directions had made but little progress. 

At Shobu-no-hama our road leaves Lake Chuzenji to ascend 
some seven hundred feet to the level of the moorland of Senjo-ga- 
liara. Near the village it passes through a pretty piece of wood- 
land which reminds one much of our own woodland at home. The 
Ryuzu-ga-take or Dragon's Head Fall is a beautiful cascade. This 
whole district is subject to sudden risings during the heavy rains 
of August, and it is at such times that these falls are at their 
best. In early October this place is a blaze of red and yellow. 
The Senjo-ga-hara is a broad valley surrounded by mountains and 
•one of the most American pieces of scenery in Japan. There is but 
little sign of native life and one feels translated to a scene of our 
western country. In early July the Shohu or Iris dots this moor 
in every direction. This Shohu is not to be confounded with the 
Shohu of Shobu-no-hama. They are written with differing ideo- 
graphs. And as thereby hangs a tale, perhaps it is worth telling. 
Many, many years ago — mukashi, znndo noo-mukashi ne, as the- 
Japanese say — the God of Akagisan who had been casting longing 
eyes in this direction determined to try conclusions with Futarra- 
5ama, the God of Nantaisan ; and so he came striding across the 



168 SAKURAMBO 

hills and kicking a dent in them at that very Asa-gata-toge, which 
we have just left behind; and the two gods met on this Senjo-ga- 
hara or " Moor of the Battlefield." Terrible was the combat and 
few the details handed down to gaping mortals, but the result was 
that Akagisama fled back in confusion and distress over the hills, 
and Futaarasama to show his joy over the victory established 
games and general festivities on the piece of flat ground near the 
head of the Lake, whence the name Shobu-no-hama or strand of 
the games. To this day once a year the priests come up from 
Nikko to the Temple at Chozenji, and early in the morning with 
full canonicals and ritual shoot an arrow into the Lake in the 
direction of Akagisan and in token of the defiance of their god. 
I know there is a more prosaic explanation which attributes the 
name of the moor to a battle fought between partisans of the 
North and South Empires during the Ashikaga Shogunate, but 
why should men seek such a " hole and corner " place to " have 
to do " with each other, as old Mallory says? One can take their 
choice — the old legend of the battle of the gods, or the official legend 
of the battle of the men. The only visible sign of a battle is a long 
mound rising in the plain to the left. The road across the moor 
is very willingly left behind. In ordinary bad weather it is a 
mudhole, and in wet weather it is under water. At such times 
nolens volens one must abandon " Shank's mare " for a more suit- 
able conveyance. On tfie other side of the moor by a short detour 
from the Yumoto road we reach the prettiest cascade in this Nikk6 
district. The Yu-no-taki is, properly speaking, that rather rare 
feature a waterslide. Something such as little Jan Ridd staggered 
up and down in his excursions to reach the Doone valley, and 
which by the way only existed in Jan's vivid imagination. It is the 
direct outlet of Lake Yumoto, and set in exquisite green plunges 
most abruptly from the sky, so to speak. One gets a better idea of 
its height — 200 feet — as they struggle up the steep path beside it 
to rejoin the road a few minutes along which brings one into 
Yumoto. The road winds under the trees along the picturesque 
little lake and soon opens up on the left the Konseitoge leading 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 169 

across to Higashi Ogawa and the valley of the Katashinagawa, to 
Numata and Ikao. Yumoto is a very isolated primitive little place. 
Purely and simply an Onsen, or bathing resort. Many foreigners 
resort to it not only for its baths but for the beautiful surround- 
ings, and the elevation of nearly five thousand feet ensures cool- 
ness in summer. But it is very much out of the world. 

In spite of its walled-in appearance there are several ways of 
getting out of Yumoto, although only two are what can be called 
popular. One road we have just come over, but it is possible to 
return to Nikko by the trail between Omanago and Nantaisan and 
come down near the Jikwan waterfall. Again, surmounting the 
little ridge just behind the village to the north a pretty walk of 
three miles through the woods brings one to a little mountain 
tarn absolutely deserted except for a wood-cutter's hut, an enter- 
prising native who has established a rough tea-shed in addition 
to his normal occupation. Climbing up and across a great land- 
slide the summit of the Toyotoge pass is reached 1300 feet above 
Yumoto. There is a fine view here over the forest-clad country 
to the north. If maps are to be relied on this trail can be followed 
to the Kinugawa, bringing one ultimately at Kawaji, which lies 
on the road between Wakamatsu and Nikko. For those whose 
object is the hot springs of Kusatsu the way out is over the Kon- 
seitoge and a few minutes before seven in the morning saw me 
on my way along the rather rough trail, which, rising gradually 
through the forest, wins much ground before the final pull up the 
zigzags of the saddle, there being a last steep climb of 600 feet to 
the top of the pass 1825 feet above Yumoto. There is a fine view 
of Nantaisan on the Yumoto side, but the rest of the day's walk 
was down through forest and over a bad trail which required 
constant attention to footing, so soft and full of roots is it. The 
country seems absolutely uninhabited, no side trails running off 
until nearly down to the valley of the Ogawa. Just below the 
saddle is a little mountain lakelet which gives a glimpse of the 
open. I had noted horse droppings near the top of the pass, and 
just beyond this lake was not surprised to meet a train of horses 



170 SAKURAMBO 

being driven up in the direction of Yumoto. Now it is well under- 
stood that horses are not taken across Konseitoge. There are 
one or two places where it would be more than advisable to lead 
the animal but otherwise the trail is feasible for them, but a nega- 
tive answer is usually given. People who do not wish to walk 
can take kago, the native litter, otherwise there is no recourse but 
to one's legs. The horses I saw mounting the trail were all fine 
well-groomed animals and looked like cavalry mounts. They were 
the only incident in the nine miles to the peasant's hut at the head 
of the Ogawa Valley. Here the scenery improves. There are 
remnants of mining operations, and just before reaching Higashi- 
Ogawa an abandoned copper mine is passed to the left. A little 
after noon I came into the pretty mountain hamlet, having come 
down some 3600 feet from the top of the pass. It can be added 
that the yadoya along this route have the reputation of furnishing 
a minimum of foreign convenience with a maximum of European 
prices, a deal table or a chair being supposed to warrant a con- 
siderable advance in the usual charges. 

The next morning at half-past six I started down the valley 
on " Shank's mare " for Numata. twenty-three miles away. 
Horses are supposed to be available at Higashi-Ogawa, but in the 
Japanese mountains everywhere one must be prepared to fall back 
on one's legs as the lasf resort, for they are quite likely to be called 
on. A few miles below Higashi-Ogawa the Ogawa is crossed and 
we enter the valley of the Katashinagawa. There is a beautiful 
view up and down from the top of the hill just beyond the school- 
house, even in this out of the way place that substantial institution 
being a prominent feature. All down the valley is a succession of 
pretty landscapes and at Okkai is a fine gorge picturesquely seen 
from the bridge. This road is good all the way. At Ohara the 
inn had gone out of business, an event that often happens in the 
country. A farmhouse, however, offered the temporary shelter 
necessary for tiffin. If one could judge by external appearance 
there was a good deal of substantial wealth all through this dis- 
trict. The farm buildings were large and elaborate, mainly half 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 171 

timber and plaster work and with far less of the flimsy wooden 
work that is a common feature of the towns. There was a great 
deal of silk spinning going on everywhere. There is a peculiar 
feature which can be referred to in connection with Japanese clean- 
liness in other directions, and that is the habit of spreading grain 
and fruit on mats and exposing them to dry in the sunshine. In 
town and in country this is carried on by the side of the public 
highway, and such products are exposed to all the contamination 
that the dust and dirt of such a place furnishes, and uncovered 
cesspools placed in close proximity to the public highway for con- 
venience of passersby add to the danger. The latter, as has been 
said, are a very necessary feature of Japanese farm life, for night 
soil is the universal fertilizer. They are often elaborately pre- 
pared cisterns dug at the foot of a hillside in the soft sandstone or 
clay so widely distributed through the land. Here the compost is 
allowed to concentrate and ripen for weeks before using, and pro- 
tected from the weather by the overhanging rock wall, or when 
built in the open, by the thatched shed erected around it. The 
Kazusakatoge had temporarily gone out of business owing to a 
landslide which removed a section of the road, so I turned sharply 
to the right and began the ascent of a little pass just behind Ohara. 
A sunny but not very steep climb of eight hundred feet took me 
to the top, from which there was a beautiful view over toward 
the Haruna ranges at Ikao. A long and pretty woodland walk 
down leads to the orchards around Takahira. In the season when 
the fruit is ripening the Japanese orchards are a funny sight. In- 
stead of, as the poets sing, the beautiful fruit " turning its blushes 
to the sun," every peach, or pear, or apple, is carefully wrapped up 
in a paper bag to protect it from the attacks of insects. This is 
no particular advantage to the fruit which needs the sun to ripen 
properly, but the native fruit-grower is " between the devil and 
the deep sea '' on this question. They take this trouble with the 
nashi. The name usually given this in English is "pear." The 
fruit itself can be described as a coarse, watery, woody, slightly 
sweet turnip, without the tail usually attached to that estimable 



172 SAKURAMBO 

and far more useful vegetable. An experience with the nashi is of 
that fibrous nature that one experiences in chewing sugar-cane — - 
with the sugar left out. Some people may say that this is hor- 
rible. So it is, but the Japanese are very fond of the nashi. Per- 
haps a development in another field of their fondness for the gro- 
tesque. Most Europeans will prefer the fragrant and beautiful 
Bartlett or Catherine pear, just as they prefer Apollo Belvedere or 
Donatello's Faun to the frowning countenance of Emma O or 
the twisting and scaly dragons. Fortunately for the walker the 
distances given in the guide-book are certainly liberal, as I came 
into Numata but ten minutes over the hour from Takahira. 
Ricksha are supposed to be available at the latter place but are not 
to be relied on unless returning to Numata. After eight hours of 
walking, half-past three in the afternoon brought me to the large 
and excellent commercial house which is the main inn of the place. 
Emphasis is to be laid on the fact that Konseitoge is to be taken 
in this direction. By the time Yumoto is reached from Nikko 
much of the ascent has already been accomplished, and after 
climbing Konseitoge it is substantially all down-hill with the 
exception of the short pass beyond Ohara. Numata itself lies at 
1500 feet elevation or 5200 feet below the top of Konseitoge. It 
is a large, busy Japanese town and a distributing centre for the silk 
produced in the districj;, and lies on the plateau which here forms a 
series of bluffs along the Tonegawa, giving the town the appearance 
of being hoisted in the air. It is like most Japanese towns, and 
would never be mistaken for the hanging gardens of Babylon. 

The shortest way to Nakanojo on the Kusatsu road is straight 
across the hills on one's legs or on horseback. The gorge of the 
Tonegawa just below Numata is, however, well worth the detour, 
and half-past six saw me bowling down the broad road which 
makes a straight plunge down to the river bed, a piece of roadway 
often seen in America or Europe but seldom seen in Japan, where 
a narrow cart track zigzagging up the face of a hillside is the more 
frecjuent means of negotiating a grade. At the foot of the hill the 
river is crossed, and we followed a fine piece of macadam running 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 173 

between towering cliffs with the broad green river boihng along 
below them. At the mouth of the gorge my men turned off cross 
country for a mile to strike into the Nakanojo road, another fine 
piece of metalling and with an easy grade following up the wide 
valley of the Agatsumagawa ; Ikao and the Haruna Mountains 
line the opposite side of the river, and we are running along the foot 
of the Nakayama range. Ahead is the mountain district of 
Kusatsu, which includes the big fellows lying to the east of the 
Nagano plain. The ride is a very picturesque one but is not 
shaded, and when about noon I reached the comfortable inn I was 
glad to rest for a couple of hours. Nakanojo is quite a large 
village, and when one has to traverse its interminable length on a 
hot summer day before the shelter of the Nabaya is reached, a very 
graphic impression is obtained as to its proportions. The town 
was getting ready for the great midsummer festival of the Japanese 
(and Chinese) , the Bon Matsuri, or " Feast of the Dead," at which 
time for three days the spirits are supposed to return to their 
former haunts on earth. Lanterns therefore must be prepared to 
light the way for them. These lanterns are usually plain white 
without even the decoration of a few Chinese ideographs. It is the 
great time for visiting temples and graves, and the priests are kept 
busy reciting memorial services. Flowers and offerings of food 
are placed on the graves, the latter with no idea that the spirits 
partake of it except in so far as the odour is agreeable to them. 
The stoppage of business while not so complete as at Shogetsu 
(New Year's) makes a very respectable second to that great fes- 
tival. New clothes are prepared and the Bon kimono and ohi 
(dress and sash) are -quite as important to the women as its mid- 
winter predecessor. Bon Matsuri is a beautiful festival and the 
idea behind it a beautiful idea ; for if one omits the lanterns from 
the scene it is plainly and simply the " All Saints' Day " of our 
western world, when, especially in Roman Catholic countries the 
visit to the graves of beloved dead, and the placing of flowers 
thereon is carried out in very much the same way as is going on 
at this midsummer date in Japan. Religions do not differ much 



174 SAKURAMBO 

in the general trend of these celebrations. The Japanese Matsuri's 
are on the whole rather sober in their tone, the only element of 
excitement being offered when at times the " God Car " is carried 
in procession through the street and the worshippers get wrought 
up to a point beyond their own control. There is, however, no 
such outbreak of general license as is seen in Carnival season in 
some cities of southern Europe, no such painful sights as the 
processions of Holy Week. It is hardly in the Japanese to muti- 
late and maul his person for religious purposes. His gods are 
closely connected to him by blood. He is in practice if not in 
theory a good deal of a materialist, and attributes the same utili- 
tarian habits of thought to his ancestor in the spirit that he does 
to the living generation. Juggernaut could develop in the South, 
but not on Japanese soil. The hair shirt and the scourge have as 
little place in this family intercourse with the gods. Meditation 
and introspection, however, quite suits their oriental habit. The 
fate of the Bodai Daruma, who sat in meditation for nine years 
until his legs dropped off, is far more likely to overtake the Jap- 
anese " religious " than that of the Stylites of old or the modern 
Indian fakir. 

Bon Matsuri is a landmark in other ways, as one takes it in 
city or country. In the country it is celebrated according to the 
old calendar and com^s in the middle of August. In the Tokyo 
district " Bon " is celebrated by the new calendar in the middle of 
July and hence comes before the Doyo or hot wet season. It is the 
signal for a scamper to the hills by everyone who can get away from 
the plain cities. Previous to that period cool weather has been the 
average and while sprinkled with intensely hot days the Nyubai or 
cold rainy season, lasting up to the first ten days of July, often gives 
some chilly rainy days, even towards its end. For a couple of 
weeks the hot dry season follows on and then comes the trying 
period of the year Doyo, the heat of which breaks rather sharply 
towards the middle of September, although the rains continue for 
another six weeks. Then follows the cold dry season up to the 
nasty sleety weather of the end of February ushering in the spring 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 175 

rains. As therefore one takes Bon in country or city he is resigned 
to the discomforts of an approaching steam bath or he is looking 
forward to relief within rneasurable distance. The Tokyo sum- 
mer, however, is by no means as bad as the latitude would give 
reason to suspect, for the climate being insular there is usually a 
lowering of temperature after midnight and a cool breeze from the 
sea. It is infinitely better than that found for instance in the 
eastern United States, and which in its turn is celestial compared 
to the Mississippi Valley, which resembles a climate the exact 
reverse of celestial. The road divides at Nakanojo, both branches 
going to Kusatsu, and both having their vigorous partisans. I took 
the road to Sawatari. Beyond Nakanojo it is much inferior to the 
fine highway up the river valley. The rise is not very heavy but 
the two men have plenty to do when they get a short distance 
away from Nakanojo. It is a very pretty ride, soon entering and 
twisting among the intricacies of the hills. Two hours after the 
start one man dropped behind, and I found myself being carefully 
lowered down a steep village street, which, with the overhanging 
eaves and general chalet appearance of the houses was so startlingly 
like a bit of Switzerland that I was involuntarily carried back a 
score of years at a jump. This was Sawatari. The impression 
remained for some time even after the familiar open structure of 
the Japanese house had regained its ascendency in the physical pict- 
ure, but the mental picture long remained. Sawatari is situated 
at the bottom of a bowl and should be intolerably hot, but was not 
on this occasion. Perhaps the elevation (1900 feet) had some- 
thing to do with it. It is a resort for the victims who have been 
taking the acid baths of Kusatsu, its waters alleviating the terrible 
sores and eruptions often caused thereby. They fill the inns, of 
which with a few large farmhouses the place consists. O Kami 
San killed the fatted calf (or chicken) for the foreigner, and as the 
plucking took place before the killing she did not add thereby to 
his appetite. Unfortunately in Japan as elsewhere the exigencies 
of the occasion, or the ignorance of the native, allows but little 
time between " grace " and " meat," and does not teach them that 



176 SAKURAMBO 

freshly killed meat boils into tough strings fit for a fiddle rather 
than a filet. However, they meant very well, and having a whole 
upper floor available threw it all open to whatever breeze there was 
on this hot August day. 

There are three methods of progress beyond Sawatari : horse- 
back, one's legs, and the native kago. I now swear by the first 
two. In a moment of confidence and a rubbed foot I selected kago 
and four sturdy bearers, and at six-thirty in the morning started 
on the day's ride which was to land me at Kusatsu, and once more 
amid foreign surroundings. Now for the first fifteen minutes as 
one lies curled up in the litter its easy swinging is the poetry of 
motion. One feels they could ride for days — with bearers at 
forty-five cents a day. In half an hour one has misgivings, and in 
an hour full conviction that he has found the original model of 
Cardinal Balue's cage. An ache and a cramp develops in every 
limb. If one stretches their legs outside the vehicle then they are 
brought into contact with the natural cushions of the forward 
bearer, which much impedes his efforts and is likely to ruffle his 
temper. The frame excoriates the backbone, or soon raises an 
artificial hump as uneasily one shifts from shoulder to shoulder. 
The position, in fact, is that utterly impossible one assumed by 
those aborigines who figure so tragically behind the glass cases 
of the Government Museum in Washington, having long since done 
with this world. This doubling of the body is also a favourite 
method of preparing the cadaver among the Japanese, and perhaps 
the kago was invented as a sort of vicarious preparation for their 
future condition. The idea of riding for days in this conveyance 
is quickly dispelled. I had nine hours of it, and postpone the rest 
for the next world. The kago has its irritations moreover entirely 
apart from its own defects of construction. Every hundred yards 
the forward man's pole goes out in signal to change. With a 
jerk you are swinging between the two staves while the bearers 
change places and shoulders. A hundred yards is not much in 
twenty odd miles and one soon gets nervously anxious to measure 
the distance and watch for that signal, and contracts a personal 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 177 

enmity against the leader and his staff which that patient creature 
hardly deserves. The road to Kusatsu from Sawatari winds 
among beautiful hills and finally ascends a pretty ravine, crossing a 
not very high pass from which a view is had across to the high 
plateau of Kusatsu now close at hand. The bare bald cone of 
Shiranesan marks the site of the village which lies at the base of 
the mountain. Between us, however, there is a great gulf fixed. 
Down the bearers go. There are green hills, rushing mountain 
streams, choice bits of woodland, and glimpses of. some real 
pasture land, and always looming up ahead the dim purple outline 
of the roughly carved mountain mass in front of us. The scene 
quickly changes as we drop down through the picturesque moun- 
tain hamlet of Namasu, clinging to the side of the steep hill above 
the Kusatsugawa. The view up and down the gorge here is' 
beautiful and the mountain masses tower up all around us. It is 
now twenty-eight hundred feet dead pull up to the plateau on 
which Kusatsu lies, and the stops of the kago men become frequent 
on the steep zigzags. However, everything must come to an end, 
and at last we emerge on the breezy upland. The grade across 
this rises easily. If it were not for its somewhat hospital-like 
surroundings Kusatsu would be one of the pleasantest resorts in 
Japan, but the place is a great resort for the lame, the halt, and the 
blind, of this part of the world. Far back in the sixteenth century 
it was known as a health resort. Perhaps longer. The Japanese 
have for a long time made medicinal use of the abundant hot water 
with which Nature has supplied them. They, too, have their 
legend of Bath and Prince Bladud, so to speak, for the somewhat 
legendary and dissipated Prince Karu was exiled by his brother to 
the hot springs of Dogo in lyo which interesting event took place 
in that still dubious period of Japanese history, 457 A. D. 

I was soon riding — not in state, for nine hours of " the cage " 
had left very little dignity — through the streets of the town. It is 
mainly a collection of inns together with the supply stores necessary 
for the large number of people who yearly flock here. The inns 
and the European hotek supply private baths, a very necessary 



178 SAKURAMBO 

condition considering a class of patients which resort to the 
cure. Having deposited my goods and chattels, I wandered 
through the town which one notices at once is most efficiently 
policed. In the back ways and by places there is a most unpleas- 
ant display of cotton wadding going through its daily washing and 
drying in the sun. Looking under the surface of its Japanese 
exterior one could see that Kusatsu was a resort of the first rank 
in importance. The inns were large and on elaborate scale, but 
Kusatsu was essentially a place where the earnest business of 
people is to get well, and there were a very large number of them 
engaged in that pressing occupation. There was of course plenty 
of tinkle of the samisen and the gay laugh of the geisha, but the 
real stern business was health and everything was subordinated 
to that end. There was none of that dolce far niente air shrouding 
it and so conspicuous in places more frequented as summer resorts, 
such as Ikao and Miyanoshita and Shuzenji. There is far too 
large a proportion of real suffering in Kusatsu to make it agreeable 
as a pleasure resort. In the lower part of the town is the leper 
settlement separate from the rest of the community. There were 
no really bad cases exposed to view, although there may have been 
many within the houses. Swollen glistening faces, shapeless noses 
and lips, puffed eyes, and the little purple black dots from the moxa 
marking the skin, were^ everywhere to be seen, walking the streets 
and pursuing their ordinary avocations. It is said that while 
leprosy is not cured at Kusatsu, it is held in check, and those resort- 
ing to the baths at stated intervals can so maintain their present 
condition. I took my way back to the centre of the town thor- 
oughly disgruntled with the shadow the place throws over one. 
The business of disease is so palpably marked. The hot steam 
from the springs was rising in a great cloud in the centre of the 
square and from a public bath-house on the right came a great 
shout every now and then and a continual clatter. This was the 
Jikan Yu or time bath. They say that this carries a temperature 
of 60° C. (140° F.), but I was assured by an habitue that it was 
not often above 50° C. (122° F.). The bathers work away at it 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 179 

for nearly an hour, beating it with long boards to cool it, and then 
slowly immerse themselves in squads. The bath lasts five minutes 
and in the tender condition of their cotton-swathed bodies the 
contact of the hot acid water must be very painful. One man took 
three and a half minutes of his five minutes before he was fully 
immersed. Clenched jaws and strained faces showed what many 
of them were undergoing. The foreign hotel at Kusatsu is a 
primitive little place, but nicely kept and situated at the farther end 
of the village, within easy access and yet removed from its more 
unpleasant features. One cannot help contrasting the develop- 
ment between this great Japanese watering place and similar devel- 
opments in the West. It is a fair comparison between what the 
Japanese in their isolation have managed to evolve from their 
social habits and what the westerner has evolved from his social 
habits. When one considers the great gay life of Carlsbad, of 
Homburg, of Aix-les-Bains, of Biarritz; centres of music, art, 
literature, of every device by which poor humanity has tried to 
get away from the burden of its flesh and the realities of things ; 
and contrasts it with the narrow little round of this Japanese hot 
springs one cannot help feeling how far the Japanese have been 
left behind in the development of their social life. The pretty 
little geisha with her artistic posturing and her samisen is a very 
poor substitute for the music of the great European masters inter- 
preted daily by expert hands in the hundreds of Casinos sprinkled 
through the Bads of Europe. The former rouses the race en- 
thusiasm of her hearers, and it is no mean thing to say that, they are 
capable of being so aroused, but the latter rouse the soul enthusiasm 
of their hearers, between which there is all the difference of things 
material and things eternal. The Japanese seems always the 
species " Japonicus." He never rises mentally to the genus 
" homo." 

Apart from, or rather in connection with the hot springs, the 
active volcano of Shiranesan is the most interesting object in the 
neighborhood of Kusatsu. Eruptions are quite frequent, the last 
having taken place in 1897. The present crater lies a short dis- 



180 SAKURAMBO 

tance off the Shibu trail and an early start from Kusatsu gives time 
for a glance and still to be able to reach Shibu in good time before 
night. If it is proposed, however, to push on to the top of the 
mountain this would hardly be possible. Although Kusatsu lies 
on the lower slopes of the mountain the summit is not visible from 
the village owing to some big grassy spurs which shut off all view 
just behind the place. An excellent horse trail runs as far as the 
peasant's house near Shirane, and there are beautiful views across 
the cut up country to the Shimotsuke ranges of which Nantaisan 
and the Yumoto Shiranesan are conspicuous objects. Incidentally 
it can be added that one should know something of the Japanese 
kuna alphabet, at least to the extent of the word doku, for some of 
the streams in this neighbourhood are arsenical. Notices are 
posted, of course in the native script, and in the absence of further 
advice it is safer to avoid drinking from any of these streams. 
On the higher slopes we pass into the district devastated by the 
last eruption of the mountain. This apparently was mainly steam, 
for the trees have been killed outright but not overwhelmed by 
any debris from the volcano. Steam had not been given the credit 
due to it in this class of natural phenomena previous to the terrible 
experience with Mont Pelee in Martinique, when it showed how 
effectually it could kill without destroying its victims, whether 
animal or vegetable. T^he peasant hut is reached 2300 feet above 
Kusatsu. At this point a rough path leads off the main trail to 
the bald bare cone on the slope of the mountain which contains 
the present crater now occupied by a lake. This cone is a disin- 
tegrated pile of shingle without a trace of any lava flow from the 
lip. We follow the cone around to the former sulphur refining 
works in the southwest corner, a distance of something less than 
a mile from where we left the main trail. The refining works 
consisted of four or five small buildings, the framework only 
standing. A few marks of fire were visible but they have gone to 
decay more from neglect than any effect of the eruption. There 
was no evidence of an eruption of mud or cinder in this direction. 
The tramway running into the crater had decayed much from the 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 181 

same cause — neglect — and was partly covered up by the washings 
of the soil from the cone above. They ascend the sharp crater 
slope obliquely at an easy angle and enter the crater by a cutting 
about twenty feet in depth. It does not furnish a good entrance 
now to the crater which is best reached by a path just behind the 
huts, and which leads to the edge of the crater and down into it by 
an easily graded path. Waraji, or straw sandals, are very useful. 
To the east, northeast, and southeast of the volcano the forest 
has been killed but not buried, the tree roots being plainly visible. 
The crater walls vary in height from fifty to a hundred feet or 
more. To the northwest beyond the present crater, which is 
situated on the slope of the m.ountain, the real summit of Shirane 
rises to 7500 feet according to geological survey figures. Stand- 
ing twenty feet above the lake the barometer reading was 2700 
feet above Kusatsu or 6500 feet, the same as the elevation of the 
refining works outside the rim. The lake is in the northeast 
corner of the crater, roughly round in shape, although somewhat 
irregular. Jt washes the steep crater walls on all sides but the 
southwest. The floor of the crater on this side has a very gentle 
slope from wall to lake. A few drainage streams have cut down 
to the surface and are the only means of approaching the water. 
At this date (August, 1904), no steam was visible and in but few 
places was the water disturbed by any sign of rising gas. It was 
very turbid with washings from the sides of the crater. The 
width of the crater looks not more than 1500 feet of which the 
lake occupies about one-half. The southwest end of the crater 
narrows to a second basin containing a shallow lakelet. The level 
of this is purely due to rainfall. A barrier separates it from the 
central lake and it has cut a channel through the soft material, a 
stream at times connecting it by a small cascade ten or twelve feet 
in height with the central lake. There was no sign of outflow of 
fresh lava. The volcanic detritus was mainly a highly silicious 
tufa, sometimes very finely divided and forming a mud which on 
drying caked into dusty friable masses. A few fragments picked 
up were more basic, being highly ferruginous. The steam, evi- 



182 SAKURAMBO 

dently emitted freely at times by the volcano, carried sulphurous 
gases — hydrogen sulphide mainly from the odour — and pieces of 
pure sulphur were found on the crater floor. Much of the tufa was 
sulphur coated, and where the rock had solidified into a natural 
cement sulphur was normally a constituent as such. From absence 
of lava flows, Shiranesan apparently is to be classed at present with 
the explosive type of volcanoes. As with Bandaisan further north. 
The last eruption of Bandaisan ( 1888) was on a much larger scale 
than at Shirane. The general character, cinder and mud, is the 
same. 

There is no particular reason why a horse should not eat rice, 
and yet it was interesting to see my nag's appreciation of the 
cooked article. A good deal of my tiffin box was left untouched, 
and he ate it up to that last grain in one sniff. I spent some time 
on Shirane as I had no wish to " rush through !' the volcano, and 
then returned to Kusatsu. For my onward journey the next day 
I substituted the foreign kago which differs from the native in pro- 
viding room for the foreigners' legs. It can be granted that it is 
an improvement on the native article, but pretty much anything is 
that. By slow degrees we again reached the peasant's hut at 
Shirane. The horse trail here strikes right up and across the ridge 
and is said to be very bad on the Shibu side. The kago trail, 
however, follows almost on a level along the ridge to a lower pass 
on the mountain, soon rejoining the horse trail in the descent. 
There is but little scenery, for the path mainly runs on the level 
through the forest, but on the Shibu side when a little way down 
there is a glorious view down the valley to the Negano plain nearly 
6000 feet below. This is not seen as a flat plain spread out below 
the eye, but is framed in at the outlet of a wild gorge hemmed in 
by lofty mountains. The dark gloom of the natural setting and 
the A^alley below smiling in the sunlight were a picture long to 
remember. The Shibutoge is one of Japan's finest mountain 
passes. The long steep descent was very interesting in spite of 
the exasperating kago, and not the least so the sharp drop down 
into the picturesque plateau or mountain valley in which Shibu 



THROUGH KOTSUKE 183 

lies. Shibu is deservedly much esteemed by those taking the after- 
cure of the Kusatsu baths. It has good inns, charming surround- 
ings, and itself is a clean pretty little mountain village. There is 
some down grade from Shibu, through a pretty country, but my 
kiirwnaya soon brought me down to the level of the Nagano plain, 
and crossing the broad Chickumagawa a hot and dusty ride brought 
me to the railway station at Toyono. In spite of its limitations as 
a town its yadoya was a very pretentious affair for a station house, 
and did a rushing business. It is only an hour into Nagano, 
whose great Zenkoji temple soon appeared, the conspicuous mark 
in the landscape. The streets were full of pilgrims in their white 
kimonos and broad mushroom hats. The inns and shops were 
jammed with them, and the venders of charms and rosaries lining 
the approach to the temple were doing a roaring trade. Bunches 
of these holy men were hanging around the shop front much like 
flies around sugar. Zenkoji is a very holy place. If native report 
could be believed it was founded at the beginning of the seventh 
century, and although elsewhere this part of Japan seemed still 
to be debatable ground with the Ebisu sullenly drawing off to the 
north, the monks of Zenkoji seemed to hold their own in this 
remote corner. It is the original resting place of the image of 
Shaka Muni, the Buddha presented to the Emperor by a Korean 
king in 552 A. D. An image over which there was no end of 
trouble as the new religion had to fight its way before " the powers 
that were " agreed to smile upon it and tolerate the worship. 
" The powers that were " were badly split on the question, and 
it was only settled by considerable blood letting during which the 
issue was very uncertain. However, here they are supposed to rest 
now. The present buildings have no connection with such an- 
tiquity. They are comparatively old, however, for Japanese tem- 
ples, dating from the fifteenth century and later. One finds this 
frequently to be the case. New buildings on an old foundation, 
the temples at Nara giving some of the few instances of real age 
in parts of the Horyiiji temple and the pagoda of Yakushi, and 
which really do belong to the seventh centurv. By the next after- 



184 SAKURAMBO 

noon I was being shoved through the grimy tunnels of the Usui 
pass, with exasperating glimpses of the roadway following the 
curves of the hills and giving beautiful views all the way from 
Karuizawa to Yokokawa. If this section is walked or ridden one 
would gain much in scenery and lose but little in time, for the cog- 
road is intolerably slow. Nightfall saw me settled in my inn at the 
foot of the fantastic rocks of Myogisan. It has been remarked by 
someone that Japanese scenery must be visited to really appreciate 
the great Japanese landscape painters. There is no better place 
than Myogisan to have an object lesson as to those fantastic 
shadow landscapes so common in Japanese pictorial art. When 
one sees the erratic peaks with their jutting crags and impossibly 
placed trees, hanging in a cloudland, so to speak, which shrouds 
their base from view, the inspiration of the Japanese artist is seen 
to lie not so much in his imagination as in his experience. And 
an early morning at Myogi, when the mist still lies along the low- 
lands, will furnish many such a view so familiar to us in Japanese 
kakemono. 



VI 



SHINANO WAY 

■' Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, 
considerable or otherwise: That the mythus of the Christian 
Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the 

eighth But what next? Wilt thou help us to 

embody the divine spirit of that Religion in a new mythus? 
What ! thou hast no faculty in that kind ? Only a torch 
for burning, no hammer for building? Take our thanks 

then, and thyself away. " 

- — Sartor Resartus. 

That common feature of a Japanese landscape at the begin- 
ning of May — strings of paper-fish ranging from three to a dozen 
feet in length and tugging away in the breeze like the living carp 
they represent — is the sign manual that boys are a feature of the 
household effects in the home over or before which they are flying. 
When the boys' festival comes around, the next following the new- 
comer's birthday, he gets a number of presents consisting of these 
paper-fish or of little groups of dolls representing the heroes of old 
Japan — Jimmu Tenno, Hideyoshi and his great general, Kato 
Kiyomasa, or the demon-haunted Shoki. The fish are hung out to 
the breeze which swells their paper bodies, and gives them a singu- 
larly life-like motion as they plunge and wriggle and undulate as if 
hooked in their natural medium. There may be one such fish and 
there may be a dozen. Every year they are so suspended from a 
pole towering above the housetop, and as years and weather do 
their work they gradually diminish in numbers, so that by the time 
the boy has reached manhood all the paper-fish have probably dis- 
appeared into the atmosphere, gently by a piecemeal process or 
i'orcibly by an exceptionally strong breeze and weak tackling. A 
cheap one can be bought for twenty-five sen and a large handsome 
one for a yen and a half. They are strongly put together and elab- 
orately decorated and last far longer than their frail material would 

1S5 



186 SAKURAMBO 

give any reason to expect. Girls are somewhat at a discount 
in a Japanese house, and this is due simply to the different position 
which the Japanese family occupies in relation to the State. In 
outward form the Japanese in this respect do not differ in any way 
from the western nations. They are at a different stage of devel- 
opment. Their usage differs from the present not the past usage of 
western nations. In these present days when we speak of our 
family in distinction from household in America, and to nearly the 
same extent in Europe, we refer to a bond which is confined to 
blood relationship, and which has very little connection left with the 
law except in so far as intestate succession is concerned. The family 
as far as we are concerned is a bond of social fellowship far more 
intimate than with the rest of the community; a public opinion 
which is likely to judge our failings far more leniently than the 
said community. Their support, however, in these days, is purely 
a matter of good will, and entirely apart from any legal compulsion 
to stand and fall together. This is due to the development of 
individualism among us, the placing on the man just as few re- 
straints as are compatible with the public peace and security of 
others. This condition is the result, however, of a long and 
gradual evolution from a very different state. Even in these days 
a man cannot stand entirely alone. This is recognized in every 
country no matter how free the individual has been left to make the 
best use of his powers^that he can to his own advantage. Every 
man owes certain duties to the State in the form of personal ser- 
vice or taxes; and the man without a country, while protected by 
a legal code far more far reaching than in olden days, is, at the 
last appeal, more helpless to-day than at any time in the world's 
history. 

In the early days when true history dawns in a nation we find 
that man's first refuge, his first call for aid, is to the family. It is 
the origin of the State. Under the old Roman law the father was 
supreme head, chief and priest. Not only the fortunes but the 
lives of the family were under his control and subject to his will. 
Children or wife were as completely in his power as any slave in 



SHINANO WAY 187 

the household. The law was not likely to be invoked except in 
case of some informality in procedure. The old law of the Twelve 
Tables was a formulated code. Provided procedure was accord- 
ing to the code from a legal point of view the justice of the cause 
was not involved. A judge could not enter into motives influ- 
encing action. Custom and the establishment of the Censorship 
were the only limitations on the father's power. In the Roman 
household as so constituted, where the father was supreme over the 
life and property of those constituting it, two questions were inevi- 
table : that of succession, and that of the woman. The question 
of succession was settled by giving preference to agnate heirs. 
That is, although a woman inherited equally with her brothers in 
her father's estate her control over such property, or rather the 
control of her husband, was limited to her dower rights and even 
over this she had power of testament so that she could return it to 
her family. By the time of the Empire the family had been very 
thoroughly disintegrated by the State, which had usurped most of 
the paternal police powers. Whereas the State had assumed the 
authority of the father in most particulars relating to property and 
the body politic, it kept woman still under thorough tutelage in 
reference to her property. This she could enjoy for her own uses 
but could not use it for the benefit of others. She could assume 
obligations for herself, but not for others. As Professor Villari 
tersely puts it, she could " hold property, increase her fortune, make 
her will, lose her virtue ; but her dowry, guaranteed and kept intact 
by law, remains hers to the end of her life." Of course in modern 
times both man and woman have been practically freed from the 
family control here described. In Europe, especially in France, 
what is known as the Family Council, can intervene in affairs of 
its members, but onty under the supervision of the Court by whom 
its decision must be endorsed. Or, as in Anglo Saxon countries, 
when relations usually call on the intervention of the Court in cases 
of incapacity requiring guardianship. This, however, is but the 
merest shadow left of the former power of the family council. 
It is to be noted that the family council had nothing but a moral 



188 SAKURAMBO 

power over the Roman pater. Legally his position held good. 
This was markedly different from the system prevailing in the 
German tribes, and of which the power of the French family council 
still gives a remaining hint. With the same position as priest and 
chief the father's power was limited by the power of the family 
council made up of the able-bodied males, whose subordination to 
him was limited much as the subordination of the chiefs to the 
king. A strong tie in times of peril and a weak one as soon as the 
danger is passed. Here also the woman was under tutelage, but 
it was the tutelage now of the far less oppressive will of the coun- 
cil. Here, too, she had rights of inheritance, and her dower was 
protected against her husband. As she took it with her, so she 
took it away with her when the connection was dissolved by death 
or otherwise, and barring her own issue the law maintained the 
interest of her own family. In both the Roman and Germanic 
family it may be noted that while the family hearth is essentially 
religious in these early times all their regulations as to the power 
granted to the father and the family are directed towards property 
rights. The property of the family is not to be diverted if possible 
into other channels. In Anglo-Saxon countries, where man has 
reached his greatest centrifugal power, the predominant right of 
the agnate line of succession has died away completely, and descend- 
ants of the same de§^ree inherit equally whether on father's or 
mother's side. The law of " entail," which under certain circum- 
stances can be broken in England, but which in some continental 
countries is very rigorous, is about the only modern instance of the 
ancient supremacy of the family. 

In comparing the Japanese family with these two forms which 
have so strongly influenced western development, a difference of 
such development can be noticed at once. Whereas all originated 
on a religious basis, the Roman and German family law quickly- 
developed on the political side, the religious element soon disap- 
pearing from view. On the political side there has always been a 
struggle between Roman and German. The centripetal force of 
the former, which resulted in the gradual transfer of the family. 



SHINANO WAY 189 

powers of the State, was brought into final concussion with the 
centrifugal tendency of the German tribes when the barbarians 
finally overwhelmed the western Empire in the fifth century. 
The State having gone to pieces, the Italian people had to fall 
back on the old family law based on the " patria potestas." 
In its centralizing power this was so much better an instru- 
ment than the looser family council of the Germanic tribes 
that in time it not only gained the supremacy but carried 
with it a great mass of the later Roman legislation still 
maintained in force among the conquered people; although the 
code the Germans introduced with them found place for a time 
side by side with it and more or less modified it. Hence in the 
ripened legislature of the Italian communes in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries such legislation is all directed to strengthening 
the family influence, although the " patria potestas " is much 
curbed. Very much curbed, the object being the unity of the 
family even to the extent of making them responsible for each 
other. To still further effect and maintain this unity property 
succession was made very rigid, and while the dower right of the 
woman was still in force, it was limited in value and still more 
limited — this being the real reason — in so far as such dower rights 
passed into the control of outsiders or members of another com- 
mune. Now in this supremacy of the family council here checked 
and strengthened by the Commune, together with the rigidity of the 
family bond itself, the Japanese family has much more in common 
than with either Roman or German family taken separately. In 
origin the reason is radically different. In the Italian communes 
it is purely political, the object being to make the family responsible 
for its members and hold the family under the immediate control 
of the Commune; the old religious basis as found in Rome and 
Germany has been eliminated. In Japan also it was the family 
that was to be held responsible for its members, it was the family 
with which the State dealt ; but its origin and its usages are purely 
religious. On its political side, however, the law took the family 
as the convenient unit, just as it would have taken the individual 



190 , SAKURAMBO 

as unit, or will take the individual as unit in the future if Japanese 
development continues on western lines. Even in the old days, 
while the father's power in Japan extended over the lives of his 
family he was subject to the family council, which, under the Jap- 
anese system, practically governed the family. There is no reason 
to believe that the system is not original with them. With the 
earliest records it is already found crystallized into shape, although 
the formula is probably adopted from China. 

Religion being Ancestor Worship, the most essential feature 
is the headship and the maintenance of the family. There must 
always be a representative to keep up the family worship and the 
law is all directed to effecting this object. Head succession goes 
according to a Lex Salique, failing 'which the course is adoption 
from cadet branches of the house or even of outsiders by mar- 
riage, that is the marriage of a daughter of the house and adoption 
of the son-in-law. The privileges of the headship are great. No 
member of the family can marry, divorce, or adopt without his 
consent ; no member can change his residence or refuse to reside 
in the place appointed by the head ; he is the preferred heir to the 
property, receiving one-half if a lineal descendant and one-third if 
not a lineal descendant of the deceased predecessor ; and he is heir 
at law to all the family property not covered by the laws of suc- 
cession. The diasdvantages are great. The whole public duty 
of the family rests on his shoulders, and the support failing nearer 
kindred; he is not allowed to take action imperilling the family 
interests; or to resign his headship unless he has reached the age 
of sixty, or has obtained the consent of his successor to so abdicate. 
That his duties are no light task is evidenced plainly enough by the 
number who do abdicate when they get the opportunity. In fact, 
it is not hard to see that the somewhat narrow field of the individual 
is, in his case, still more rigidly confined, and he can hardly take 
any action without considering the effect it may have on the wider 
interests of which he is the guardian. To some extent he is aided 
by the family council, who at times deal with marriage, divorce, 
adoption, or family disputes. These matters were and are settled 



SHINANO WAY 191 

within the family. In cases involving the interests of minors and 
orphans the family council is obliged to act. Appeal can be made 
from their decisions to the Courts, which on grounds of public 
policy will uphold the council if it is possible to do so. As m 
western life, property although a subsidiary interest, is an im- 
portant one. Hence marriage is one of the most important func- 
tions of the headship. Woman who cuts a subsidiary figure in 
the West here cuts none at all. Only under one condition does 
woman figure, and that is when owing to failure of heirs male she 
becomes the head of the house. Under all other conditions her 
exit from the family is a radical one. Her connection with it 
ceases with her marriage and she becomes part and parcel of her 
husband's family, and the ceremony of purification following Iier 
departure to her husband's house is akin to that following the 
removal of a corpse. Legally speaking, her name is erased from 
the register of her family and entered on that of her husband's 
family. Marriage therefore means the entrance or the loss of a 
member of the family, and hence comes under the power of the head 
of the family, and if marriage takes place without his consent he 
can expel the offending member and forbid his or her re-entrance 
into the family. A species of excommunication from the house- 
hold gods. In relation to illegitimates the Japanese family law is 
more akin to the German law than to the Roman or Communal 
code. Under the Roman code an illegitimate child could only be 
recognized by adoption, having in that privilege equality with a 
stranger. Under the Japanese law an illegitimate child recognized 
by the father becomes a co-heir with the legitimate children, although 
his share of the parents' estate is less than that taken by a legitimate 
child. Under the German code the illegitimate child also shared 
in the parents' estate, and in much the same proportion as under 
the present Japanese law — two-thirds to one-third — although the 
ratio depended within certain limits on the number of legitimate 
children. These are of course all measures to maintain the family 
in the blood line. But as in old Rome it was necessary to maintain 
the family in its relation to the State, so in Japan it has always 



192 SAKURAMBO 

been held to be necessary to maintain the family in relation to 
worship of ancestors, and a means had to be found when lack of 
heirs in male line threatened its extinction. The remedy in both 
cases was found in adoption, limited according to the Roman law, 
and up to recent times unlimited by the Japanese law. Under the 
Roman law the adopted had to be so far removed in age from the 
adopter — fifteen years — as to be properly the adopter's child, and 
right to adopt was limited to those who had passed fifty years. 
Under the old Japanese code no natural relation in age was taken 
into consideration. A minor, even a child, could adopt an adult, 
the object in this case not being the succession to the property of 
the family but the proper maintenance of the family worship. 
Under the present code, however, the person adopted must be 
younger than the adopter, and the latter cannot be a minor. Jap- 
anese family law undoubtedly lays far greater stress on the im- 
portance of adoption than is found among western peoples, and in 
so far as the German law has modified the Roman law the breach 
here between East and West is widened. The peculiarity of Jap- 
anese law in this particular is due to the religious bias — worship of 
ancestors carried on by male descendants only. This has relegated 
woman to a position that had had no parallel in the western world." 
In the Roman world the woman was sacred as mother. In the 
barbarian world wonsan was sacred as wife. If man did not 
regard the dignity of her position as the mother of the race he re- 
garded her weakness, and on that ground this rough society threw 
over her its protection. In the Middle Ages she was a valuable 
prize, and according to who obtained possession of her often went 
the government of provinces. In all cases she was under strict 
tutelage. In the East she has always been regarded merely as a 
breeding machine. That she is respected as parent is true. In 
spite of her motherhood is also true. As daughter she is subject 
to her father ; as wife to her husband ; as mother to her son ; and 
this for ages past not for any necessity of protection but simply for 
reasons of sex. For this reason she never has and never can take 
her position with man until she is made his companion. How the 



SHINANO WAY 193 

Japanese man reconciles his mother's womanhood to his undoubted 
affection for her is probably an example of mental acrobatics only 
possible to eastern casuistry. But after all the world is ruled at 
bottom by brute force. With all our knowledge of the germ theory 
of life, that we are as much our mother as our father, woman 
holds her position of inferiority. Must hold it as long as men's 
muscles maintain their supremacy. The world is a long way from 
beating its swords into ploughshares, and fortunately or unfor- 
tunately woman's brains do not march pari passu with her 
privileges. 

The most tedious perhaps of railway journeys in Japan is 
the ride around Tokyo on the connecting railway between Shina- 
gawa and Akabane. Not that the distance is great, for it is some- 
what less than fourteen miles, or that the speed is abnormally low 
for the amount of jolting and shaking that one gets creates at 
least the impression that one is travelling with some degree of 
progress; but it takes an hour and longer to cover this wretched 
distance and at times the whole system seems suspended, the plat- 
form bare and deserted even by the pedlars of tobacco, news- 
papers, and kwashi. Anywhere else such periods of waiting are 
broken by the arrival of the train from the opposite direction. But 
not on this line. Apparently without any reason, or as if it had 
become tired on its own account, the engine wakes up with a snort 
to make a lazy plunge for the next station and probably to repeat 
the operation. I was using this road early one May oil my way to 
Kofu and it was during one of these stops that a little plot of the 
ayame or early Iris caught my eye jammed in between the squares 
of the paddy fields. Now, on a preceding fourth of May at a 
country inn, I had come in contact with " Things Japanese." On 
entering the bath-room I found the tub decorated with Iris leaves, 
and after a little finessing managed to draw out the following 
explanation which can be taken as one form in which traditional 
ideas and superstitions still hang on in spite of the limelight of 



13 



194 SAKURAMBO 

science, newspapers, and the general tendency to materialistic ex- 
planation. 

In Japan as in most other countries the woman works in 
the fields, her occupation taking her into the hills and the woods 
and other such places which from time immemorial have been sup- 
posed to be the favourite haunts of various supernatural beings. 
Japanese gods are quite as frail as the gods of the ancient Greeks, 
and in Japanese folklore the story of Danse, of Lida, and of Europa 
has been often repeated and reproduced, although with but little of 
the charm that the old Greek fancy could weave about its legends. 
The evidence of such unexpectedly inconvenient honour was shown 
in the offspring, and the children carried some mark of their super- 
natural origin, such as excessive hairiness, great size, peculiarity 
of facial resemblance fancied or otherwise, to some animal whose 
form the god had assumed when he courted his victim. In this 
way the country people explained the many pranks that Nature 
often plays on man in his offspring. There was a remedy, how- 
ever, for such unsuspected violations. If the bath was decorated 
with the leaves of the shobu at this date those using it could after- 
ward go about their occupations on the hillside without fear of 
such accidents and hedged against any attempts of their divinity- 
ships. Tacked onto this superstition is the idea that the shobu leaf 
relieves headache and by binding it around the brows this unde- 
sirable adjunct to bad fterves or bad stomach can be driven away. 

A jerk of the train and all ideas as to Japanese traditions were 
quickly dispelled. None of the Japanese railroads are particu- 
larly distinguished by smoothness of roadbed and the Tokyo belt- 
line is no exception, although not so bad as the Northern Railway. 
Incidentally I will add that the roughest piece of roadway I have 
experienced, akin to a milk shake apparatus, has been in a country 
noted for the expense and solidity of its railway construction ; but 
the branch line running from Stratford on Avon across country 
and passing through Towcester can, or could, equal any piece of 
temporary construction work put together even in the States. At 
the time I speak of, this Kofu railway was only in operation as far 



SHINANO WAY 195 

as Saruhashi. Although the Hne was a continuous one at Hachioji 
we passed off the rails of the government road and on to those of a 
private corporation. The idea of a traffic arrangement for pas- 
sengers did not seem to have entered the official brain, and it is 
pretty safe to say that it was not likely to do so spontaneously. 
At all events, after a pretty ride over the Tokyo plain which is 
always picturesque with its clumps of woodland and the distant 
mountains, we were turned out for another long wait before con- 
tinuing our onward progress. The mountains are now close at 
hand, the range encircling Fuji to the north, and soon after leaving 
Hachioji we plunge into a valley gradually narrowing as the road 
progresses. The scenery now becomes very fine. The railway 
climbs along the slopes high above the river and a good deal of tun- 
nelling is necessary to negotiate the abrupter section of the gorge. 
Although I had made an early start it was late afternoon before I 
reached Saruhashi, a picturesquely situated mountain village. One 
hears much of fleas in Japan, but my experiences with that sprightly 
animal have been few and far between. Saruhashi tried to make 
up the deficiency, and here he swarmed, and the picturesque situ- 
ation of the inn close to the " monkey bridge " does not make up 
for this drawback. One's attention is withdrawn from the scenery 
to go flea hunting, a too absorbing and immediate occupation to 
admit of any delay. The view from the bridge is very pretty. 
The narrow river is here confined between perpendicular walls 
relieved by much green vegetation. The name probably is derived 
from one of those crazy structures of bamboo still to be found in 
the mountain districts of Japan and which properly seem made for 
monkeys not men. I was kept too busy to thoroughly enjoy the 
hospitality of my Boniface and was glad to get on my way next 
morning. It was ten miles to the Sasaotoge, accomplished by 
hasha, or native omnibus, and over a most atrocious road which 
can hardly be classed as passable for ricksha, being mainly a con- 
glomerate of deep ruts, stones, and gulleys. The rougher basJm 
can fight its way through this stuff, but we had a wretched agent of 
locomotion in a poor, starved, overdriven, tottering horse that was 



196 SAKURAMBO 

just able to maintain its footing. One does not have to go far 
afield to get illustrations of Japanese brutality towards animals. 
And the curious side of the question is that the more useful the 
animal, the less care seems to be taken of it. The dog has teeth 
and some disposition to use them, and anyhow has a strong family 
resemblance to his still wild relatives. The cat is a rather non- 
obtrusive animal that calls for no particular attention beyond 
some daily food. The dog gets more attention from children, 
although not to the extent that is lavished on him in the western 
world. His acuteness does not seem to have attracted notice if 
one can judge by the fables in which he plays a far less conspicuous 
and benevolent part than birds. Cats are strictly unpopular, per- 
haps due to Buddhist prejudice against them, the cat being the only 
animal that did not mourn the Buddha's death. Their useful side, 
however, is recognized and they are at least let alone if not petted. 
The horse, however, is a co-worker with the coolie, who seems to 
have gotten on a very superficial understanding with him. They 
do not recognize that the animal's efficiency and duration — in 
general terms, his usefulness — is enhanced by good treatment ; that 
it is a question ot economy to take care of him. The scenes wit- 
nessed on the Yokohama hills, when the unfortunate brutes zigzag 
up the slopes hidden under their staggering loads, are due strictly 
to a native inherent iridifference to animal suffering. They will 
not eat meat on religious grounds, and will drive the animal until 
it drops of exhaustion. My particular Bucephalus was a mass of 
sores wherever his Joseph's coat of harness touched him, for it was 
made up of everything- from iron wire, through scraps of leather, 
up or down to pack thread doubled and twisted many times to make 
it hang together. If the driver or hetto had but little idea of the 
economical usage of his animal he had a keen knowledge of its 
tender points. After a few miles the poor brute stopped of exhaus- 
tion. He was then assisted along for another hundred yards by 
inserting a strap under his fetlock and giving it a sharp tug much 
like hitting a man sharply on the crazy bone. This ingenious 
device was the suggestion of a passing farmer. Another effective 



SHINANO WAY 197 

spur was beating him at his sore points. It was all done in perfect 
good temper. There was no display of anger or ill temper. The 
horse instead of being a mass of palpitating feeling flesh might 
have been a mechanical contrivance of which the problem was to 
find the spring that moved it. Protests merely occasioned a trans- 
fer to some other form of abuse, the acme being when the driver 
and some enthusiastic assistants among the wayfarers gleefully fell 
on him with a railway tie as persuader. We walked into Kuronota 
thoroughly disgusted and inwardly vowed to take any means of 
getting out of the district than basha. A society for the prevention 
of cruelty to animals is badly needed in Japan, but its work would 
have an unusually discouraging basis to start on, for the only 
hope of success would be by appealing to the argument of future 
economy and this has but little weight with the Japanese who 
lives essentially in the present. It is a steep but not long climb 
over a bad road to the top of the pass. The view from the sum- 
mit is not at all striking. A few miles down brings one into more 
picturesque surroundings and hence out on the Kofu plain. All 
this ride, however, is now obviated by the extension of the railway 
to Kofu. 

The Bosenkaku at Kofu was a delightful stopping place and 
one of the best examples of the better class Japanese inns. Placed 
at the entrance of a public park it has a pretty garden of its own, 
the inn running around it on three sides. They have a European 
scale of prices, perhaps because Kofu is much frequented by 
tourist foreigners who make it their starting point for the trip 
down the Fujikawa. While stopping here I had an opportunity to 
try some of the local vintage. Kofu is a noted place in Japan for 
grapes, although it hardly would attract attention elsewhere. The 
sample brought savoured decidedly of the unfermented juice and 
a conspicuously earthy taste found in the lower grades of Cali- 
fornia and Australia wines. There was more trouble with getting 
transportation onward, and the local worthies profited to the full 
extent of the necessities of their prize. I referred to this afterward 
on my return and I was told by Japanese that the Kai-Shinano dis- 



198 SAKURAMBO 

trict was rather notorious for that sort of thing. From ancient 
times the lower classes have been noted for their roughness, and the 
floating element of "tough" hanging just on and outside the 
pale of the law has given more trouble here than elsewhere. In 
old days the kidnapping of country girls and forwarding them to 
the Yoshiwara of Yedo and to other cities was a profitable busi- 
ness to the men of Kai. It was good that I got off early the next 
day, for my men were the very reverse of energetic. We had a 
long day before us and they practically walked the sixteen 'ri ( forty 
miles) to Kami-no-Suwa. There are no passes on the way and the 
road is fairly level and good. The scenery is pretty but decidedly 
commonplace. It is a great silk district and every house had its 
women hard at work. It is those skilful little fingers of the 
women that are the backbone of this great industry and of many 
other industries, and without them Japan would be in a veiy bad 
way economically. The full share of the manual labour falls on 
them. There is a good deal of factory life through the district and 
mills are a feature both of Kami-no-Suwa and Shimo-no-Suwa. 
In the old days all this work used to be carried on in the household, 
the product being taken to the middleman's agent, but modern 
exigencies have wrought this great and unpleasant difference, for 
it is only very recently that the Japanese seem to have worked up 
to the fact that legislation was needed to protect the employees. 
Long hours, few breaks in the monotony of their work, for the 
Japanese observation of a weekly rest day does not filter down to 
these establishments, and wages which even from the standpoint 
of Japanese living are trifling. A Japanese coolie at thirty sen a 
day is from his standard of living — by no means a bad one in food 
and clothing — getting a dollar and quarter a day. The carpenter 
and roofer at sixty sen a day are far more than doubling the rate 
for the list of superfluities that become necessities as we rise in 
the scale is but little extended in Japan. The old influence of a 
certain standard for each separate class still makes itself felt. A 
woman in the mills of Osaka gets ten cents a day. They are 
housed by their employers and the recent legislation has been 



SHINANO WAY 199 

directed to regulating the abuse of this feature of their work and 
enforcing decent regard to sanitary conditions. Men's labour is 
better protected through their guilds. In fact, the guild is to-day 
such an important feature of Japanese commercial life that it is 
quite as necessary to take it in consideration as the Government 
^itself. In the West, with its individualizing tendency, the guild 
has gradually been eliminated, although the latest socialistic doc- 
trines have been retrograding to the form in fact if not in theory. 
The JEast has carried this segregation of crafts to an extreme, even 
to the extent of appropriating parts of town and city to the 
exercise of particular forms of labour. As the political system 
eliminates the individual and deals with the family, so the economi- 
cal system eliminates the individual and deals with the guild. 
There is no life outside of the guild, hence the individual must bow 
to its orders on penalty of starvation. The Japanese guilds run 
through the whole gamut of society from the religious formalities 
of the ancient and honourable swordmakers lost in the mists of 
time up to the most complete and modern Labour or Capital Trust. 
Labour has always worked through the guilds and has known no 
other way, simply because the political and religious systems have 
prevented any development of individualism. In the face of mod- 
ern institutions this has given rise to a curious condition of affairs. 
As disputes between individuals are settled by the guilds, so dis- 
putes between the guilds are settled by arbitration, and although 
the courts are in full operation bold is the man who in either case 
appeals to them without the sanction of the guild. Cases are 
notoricxis where foreigners in dealing with Japanese have carried 
their case successfully through the devious and irritating channel 
of Japanese litigation to be met with the dictum of the guild, 
" Accept an arrangement, thus and so, or close business with the 
guild," which of course means cease business in Japan. There 
are plenty of examples in western commercial life where pressure 
of a kind is put on the smaller fry by the great corporations ; where 
a man is driven out of business by ruthless competition or by the 
more underhand method of threatening his customers' business if 



200 SAKURAMBO 

they continue to deal with him. These we recognize and try to 
reach in every way possible to the lawmaker and against the 
lawbreaker. I doubt very much, however, if there is any corpora- 
tion in America so great that it would dare to send notice to a 
successful litigant that he must settle the case as decided by them, 
without reference to the court's decision, or cease dealing with 
them. Such contempt of court would receive drastic punishment. 
They might try and frame a way to avoid the court's decision or 
wriggle out of it as best they could, but on the face their submission 
would be absolute, and they would pay for any rash misinter- 
pretation they put on such decision. In the guilds we meet also 
with another feature which accents the radical difference between 
East and West. In the West while their basis was communistic, 
their action was mainly political. Under the western trade guilds 
the plebs make their appearance in the political life of Rome. 
Although under the crushing power of the emperors the collegia 
and sodalitia have but little power, still the main object is 
protection against outside encroachment on the rights of their 
members. Their object is not purely social. On the fall of 
the western empire they were probably the only means of 
protection to the lower classes in the frightful confusion that 
followed that fall, and the disintegration of any organized opposi- 
tion to the floods of barbarians pouring over Italy. And it is these 
organizations that in a political sense first raise their head against 
the oppression of the feudal system. Their object always is trade 
and its advancement, but this they are always seeking to grasp by 
means of the political power, so that in the thirteenth century 
we find the most powerful of the powers dividing Italy to be a 
Commune of Guilds — Florence. The inherent right of a man 
to guide his own destiny, the democratic germ of modern Europe, 
has always lain within the wrappings of these guilds from the 
earliest times of western life. To be sure, in recent times the 
formation of the great labour and capital trusts have modified this 
sentiment, and the tendency of the leaders of both has been to split 
our western communities into a congeries of interests where the 



SHINANO WAY 201 

circles touch each other but are not concentric. The labour leaders 
have abandoned the old struggle for freedom, which has been car- 
ried on through centuries and at the cost of so much effort and 
bloodshed. The right of a man to earn his daily bread in the way 
he finds best suited to him is to be transposed into the right of a 
man to work if the labour leader chooses to let him work. No 
new features are introduced into the scheme. Limitation of the 
number of apprentices admitted to the guild, and limitation of the 
output of work and hence the creation of an artificial demand. 
We seem to be returning to the old days when the guilds ruled the 
corporation of London with this difference, that the guilds of those 
days made the good quality of their products a great object and 
punished severely bad work, whereas the present guilds are directed 
to protecting the bad work at the expense of good work. The 
western world seems to hesitate at present as to whether the indi- 
vidualization has been carried too far; as to whether the weaker 
guilds (the labour unions) are not to be supported against the 
stronger guilds (the capitalists). The people are likely in time, 
however, to find the balance, as they have often done before. Evo- 
lution does not work backward. Even if Nature staggers around 
a little trying to get its footing and producing some freaks in the 
process. It is much easier to be controlled by many with their 
various distracting interests, than to be under the guiding will of 
a single despot always at hand and with his whole attention con- 
centrated on a limited space to crush out any individualism that 
might arise. Individualism is too ground into the western mind 
and this return to the guild system carries the seeds of its death 
within it. The Capitalist Trust, the most vulnerable of the two, is 
always subject to the will of the majority. The Labour Trust 
by its very victory over Capital would dissolve. Its cause for 
existence would be cut away from under it. The Japanese guild 
does not bother — as yet — about the political side of the question. 
Individualism with its free man and free mind has no place in 
Japanese Absolutism. The guild has no relations with external or 
internal politics, but it has a very drastic control over its members. 



202 SAKURAMBO 

and in this it has the Government support, which finds it easier to 
deal with and hold responsible the heads of the guilds than to 
deal with and hold responsible the individual units. Just how far 
they are laying up for themselves trouble in the future by nourish- 
ing this imperium in imperio will only appear when the guilds make 
their step forward into politics. The control of the guilds is a 
very important matter, and the men who gain that control direct 
the lives of many of their fellow citizens as a living is not possible 
outside of them. 

It was dark before I started down the hill above Kami-no- 
Suwa. This is the nearest approach to a pass on the whole stretch 
from Kofu north to the Nakasendo. The inn at Kami-no-Suwa 
was a big commercial house with a beautiful garden, and from 
my room aloft I had a full sweep over the country toward the 
lake beyond, and just below my eyes the ground plan of the afore- 
said garden as seen from above. We were nearly " full up," and 
the evening was well advanced before the police book and supper 
came around. The inn people were invaluable in the ensuing 
struggle with the ricksha men. It was not advisable to press mat- 
ters too far with them for they could refuse to go beyond the 
mountain village of Wada, where it was undetermined whether 
other ricksha were to be found or not. I found out, however, from 
the inn people that I oould get out of the district without troubling 
myself about ricksha men farther than a little town called Shiojiri, 
and in fact, if it had been convenient, basha was available all the 
way from Kami-no-Suwa. To Shiojiri therefore I departed the 
next morning, a pretty ride around the head of the lake and over 
a good road. I say a good road for the ricksha men chose to take 
a short cut over a very bad one. After giving them ample oppor- 
tunity to earn their "peculium " I clambered up the last hundred 
yards of the hill, leaving them to shoulder the ricksha for progress 
on wheels was impossible. The inn at Shiojiri was a pretty little 
place, a matter of some importance, for it lies on the Nakasendo 
road, which is one of the show routes for scenery in Japan. On 
foot is a charming way to go through the country, but it must be 



SHINANO WAY 203 

understood that there are Hmitations to putting it into practice. 
For a party of young foreigners to go through the country in this 
way, as so many do through Switzerland and the Black Forest, for 
instance, would arouse the wildest suspicion in the eyes of the 
native, and they would quickly find themselves being held up and 
questioned by the police to their no small annoyance. Where the 
use of a camera even in the streets of Shimonoseki gives no end of 
trouble, and involves at least the forfeiture of the instrument, it can 
be imagined that sketching and photographing through the moun- 
tains even in permitted districts is sure to arouse the suspicions of 
the local Cerberus, who has large ideas as to his responsibilities and 
the full inclination to confiscate first and determine the legal bear- 
ing of the question afterward. The foreign traveller desired in 
Japan is he who is accompanied by a native guide to carefully take 
him over the frequented routes, and where no new responsibilities 
are dumped on some official who finds himself presented with a 
case not covered by that part of the rules which are familiar to 
him and relieve him of the trouble of thinking. The foreign resi- 
dent also gives but little trouble. He usually speaks more or less 
of the language, and has business connections which quickly estab- 
lish him as a responsible person and within reach at all times and 
seasons. In such a fortified camp as Europe the military authori- 
ties only trouble themselves about fortified neighbourhoods, and 
what the native is allowed to sketch or photograph, the same privi- 
lege is extended to the stranger; in Japan such zones are ex- 
tremely liberal, and — to make a sort of bull which fits the situation 
however — where it is allowed it is safer first to get permission, 
even if it be the photographing of some harmless and battered 
Buddha surrounded by dirt and children and in the confined lanes 
of a crowded city where there are certainly no strategic features 
except to the eye of the official. In Japanese eyes everybody is a 
spy. In this they imply no discredit. It is their own general 
practice, and what they do themselves they naturally expect other 
people to do. There is none of that instinctive repugnance which 
the practice arouses in the western mind and which only the neces- 



204 SAKURAMBO 

sity of occasion sanctions. With us the personaHty of the indi- 
vidual is his own concern, and we hesitate to intrude on it except 
in so far as is agreeable to him. Hence but little attention is paid 
to a man's actions in so far as there is no special reason. To the 
Japanese there is no such thing as privacy. They live in public, 
their individuality is crushed out by every custom that can be 
brought to bear on it, they have never gotten beyond the com- 
munal stage even in their home life. For a Japanese girl or boy, 
or even for a man or woman, to have a room to retire to as their 
own, sacred against the intrusion of others, is unknown. There 
are no doors, no locks, paper screens only through which a whisper 
can be heard from one room to another. Where, after the futons 
are rolled up and stowed away for the day, the whole establish- 
ment is thrown into one big common room for the whole household, 
where one's most private life is carried on therefore " coram pub- 
lico " from their first appearance, any such feeling of individualism 
as the West feels toward spying is not blunted but simply is unde- 
veloped. There is one feature of this trait that soon attracts the 
attention of the westerner. That is the .intensely personal ques- 
tions that are asked by his casual eastern acquaintance, and which 
are usually set down to the " custom of the country," the interest 
that is supposed to be polite by taking in the well-being of the 
stranger. In part, it jnay be formula or has become formula, but 
at bottom these questions have little to do with politeness. They 
are part of the general system of being able to answer as far as 
possible as to everything that can be gleaned from the stranger. 
This is in part due to the nature of the relation between the govern- 
ing powers and the governed, the method employed being that of 
holding a man responsible for his neighbour. The system of 
local government is better considered elsewhere, but one feature of 
such responsibility has been the development of just this form of 
underhand inquisition. It is analogous to the position of the 
teacher who encourages tale-bearing among his pupils. It has 
indeed grown second nature with this people who are held in a kind 
of tutelage by their officials. In this sense it is often relieved from 



SHINANO WAY 205 

that form of impertinence of which the shining example in western 
literature is " Paul Pry." But not seldom your kind inquiring- 
acquaintance will march off to the police box adjacent, with his 
information, retailing it with a directness and gesture in your direc- 
tion which at least shows a sense of amusing guilelessness. Polite- 
ness certainly has little to do with many instances. Apart from 
the little irritation it arouses in the western mind, the practice 
does not work to the injury of any foreigner with legitimate pur- 
poses, and, as I have said before, it adds perceptibly to the safety 
of journeying through unfrequented by-roads and through iso- 
lated districts. But enough has been said as to the " politeness of 
the habit." 

It is worth going into this question of Japanese politeness, 
for it is an excellent instance as to the effect of an iron code 
on a people, which, originally purely disciplinary, has effected. a 
change in the intimate nature of the people themselves. Let it 
be understood that the old code of etiquette in Japan was in no 
way intended as a school for politeness. It was to mark off caste 
from caste, the low man from his superior. It was not enough to 
mark the separation by occupation and increased privileges in the 
community, but the distinction must always be employed wherever 
the two castes come in contact. When the greater lord and his 
train met the lesser, the latter must draw to the side of the road 
and respectfully wait for him to pass. When the clown met his 
superior on his travels, he must crouch in the ditch with his face 
to the ground so as to avoid even the pollution of his glance to 
meet the cortege. One caste was not allowed to ignore the pres- 
ence of the other caste. The formulas were to be obeyed. No 
samurai was to be censured for cutting down a peasant who 
had failed in respect to him. Now this respect was based in first 
instance not on any moral code but on authority, and as consid- 
eration for those below by no means increases as we go down the 
scale, the lower classes would receive but little relief from pressure 
of those more immediately in authority over them. The kick that 
is handed down from the top is always passed on with a little 



206 SAKURAMBO 

interest, and the last man probably kicks the dog. Another feature 
iS' that there is absolutely nothing democratic in the constitution 
of the Japanese people. Their organizations have been purely for 
trade. Politics were not only foreign to their purpose but were 
absolutely forbidden them. Hence the lower class Japanese got a 
full dose of authority, and such authority took care not to let them 
forget by ceaselessly putting before their eyes the practice of it on 
the peril of the most severe punishment — at times even death — 
if they failed in any particular. Under such training it was that 
the Japanese nation learned to be polite. Polite to all above him, 
polite to his equals, for as his government lay in the hands of his 
superiors so it was an offence to trouble that superior with their 
petty quarrels. Woe to the man who gave rise to some such 
disturbance on frivolous grounds. It was not only the law of the 
land that was offended but the magistrate himself, and it was " the 
rule of the Cadi," round measure did one or sometimes both of 
the litigants receive. Now this submission was not so difficult to 
force on the people inasmuch as the ground had already been 
broken for it by the existing religious code which made obedience 
to superiors a cardinal feature of such code. The Japanese peasant 
is ordinarily very religious, and in no way wishes to do anything 
that would offend or arouse the anger of the gods. And he car- 
ries this out in the very practical way of prayers and contribu- 
tions. Anyone who spends a little time in the grounds of some 
temple will note the large number of worshippers that come in this 
private manner to make their petitions to the divine power. They 
are of all grades of society, poor and rich, cotton and silk, men 
and women, and many young girls, and to pray for much the same 
things as they do in far-off Europe. The safe return of a son, 
for a male child in an approaching delivery, or for an obi or sash. 
Seated beside some little rural temple it is noticeable, the large 
proportion of the passersby who stop for a few minutes to offer 
. up a prayer. Submissive to authority as a right, reinforced by sub- 
mission to authority as a duty, has made attention to the little de- 
tails of human intercourse a second nature to a class of people 



SHINANO WAY 207 

whose daily life in close contact to and struggle with the soil would 
give but little occasion for such niceties, and which in other ways, 
in indifference to human suffering, or in cruel treatment of animals, 
and in practice of the grossest superstitions, shows its rougher 
nature and the usual effects of such contact. This harsh and exact- 
ing treatment has indeed made the mass of the Japanese a polite 
people. There is an instinctive feeling when brought in contact 
with it that it is not sincere, a feeling that the person practising 
it is using a code and is not speaking from the heart. It is not, 
however, the superficial politeness of the French, all smiles and 
bows while the wind sits in the right corner. Let conditions 
change and the Gallic storm is let loose with a range and houle- 
versement that staggers the onlooker from the colder and more 
self-contained North. The Japanese rarely lose control of them- 
selves. They can be as cold, harsh, malicious, and unforgiving 
toward each other as any race that has ever been planted on that 
trifling little planet Terra. I have chanced upon but one physical 
encounter in public and that turned out to be between Chinamen, 
who, far from being a pacific race individually, have the reputation 
of fighting " at the drop of a hat." Yakamashii (noisy) is a term 
of reproach among the Japanese. When their quarrels do reach 
the point of violence they too often end in the Quarter Sessions 
Court, not the magistrate's office. Feuds will go on in this way 
smouldering until the community is startled some day with the 
wholesale slaughter of a whole household, the original difference 
having started over some trifling matter that English or Americans 
would have settled with a few stiff punches. There is another 
feature in connection with Japanese politeness and that is the trans- 
lation of their honorifics. The honorific O is translated " honour- 
able," this being its proper meaning and often so used in our sense 
of the term; but one feels, living among the Japanese, that as 
used in common life — anything from O Ichi San, " Honourable 
Miss First," to O Ncko San, " Honourable Mr. Cat," — it is purely 
conventional. It is in no sense a title, as when we speak of the 
Honourable Mr. X, member of Congress or of Parliament. Every 



208 SAKURAMBO 

gesture and tone of the voice show that it has become a customary- 
expression, and Oide and Goran nasai are simply used in the sense 
of " come here, please " and " look, please." The honorific abso- 
lutely disappears in Ohayo, " honourably early," which is " g-ood 
morning," and nothing else. 

A foreign style basha — that is, with seats — took me the few 
miles that still remained between Shiojiri and the terminus of the 
railway at Matsumoto. This is a large ugly Japanese town beauti- 
fully situated at the head of the picturesque valley which practically 
runs south all the way to Kofu. The mountain wall of Hida rises 
to the westward and it is cut off on the east from the valley of 
Nagano and the Chikumagawa by another lofty range. The 
railway was still very new to Matsumoto and the station had quite 
a crowd of townspeople and countrymen around it engaged in 
watching the shifting of the cars and other operations novel to 
many of them. After leaving Matsumoto the railway soon entered 
the hills, winding around among the valleys here not presenting 
the trim rice-fields and other features of farm life so common in 
Japanese scenery, but that of a sparsely settled district and a good 
deal of wild nature such as you see winding among the foothills of 
the coast range in California. These hills grew higher and more 
rugged, and after some fine gorge scenery we plunged into a tunnel 
to find on the other side one of the striking views of Japan. The 
whole broad Nagano valley lay far below at our feet, with the 
mountains of Kotsuke towering up in front on the other side. 
It was a beautiful scene of exquisite cultivation and rugged nature 
grandly harmonized ; of brilliant light with shadows cast by cloud 
and mountain; and the Japanese rice-fields are always pleasing, 
broken here and there by graceful clumps of trees shrouding some 
shrine or giving shade to some farmhouse. We were in such close 
quarters here on the mountain that a curve was out of the question, 
so reversing the train by a V turn we were backed down and 
gradually were brought to the valley level into the midst of this 
rich land which had been stretched under our eyes during the 
descent. As everywhere else, it is the land and those that live on 



SHINANO WAY 209 

it that are the backbone of the Japanese nation, and, as if recog- 
nizing that the people who own the soil are those having the 
greatest stake in it, the Government in so far as it allows any voice 
in public affairs has always favoured the agriculturist. These 
farms sprinkled over Japan therefore answer the question as to 
what are these country people? How have they lived and how 
do. they live? How is their property regulated and distributed? 
We all know what interest a stout old farmhouse presents in our 
own home landscape. A house which has weathered generations 
of change, not as in cities accompanied by the rise and fall of men's 
fortunes in the ephemeral forms of created wealth changing not 
only with men's needs but with men's habits, but in that solid 
permanency attached to the soil and which is an inherent quality of 
" landed property." The farmer in Japan alvv'ays has been a 
person of some consideration. Even in recent feudal days he was 
ranked next to the samurai, although far below him, being the first 
in rank of the people, followed by the artisan class, and lowest of 
all the merchant class. Below the latter were the outcasts and the 
etas, who were officially without standing as men at all being 
known as hinin or " not men." The position of the peasant in 
the early days has already been mentioned. The form in which 
property was held followed much the history of the class. The 
number of the true yeoman class who owned their property in their 
own right, " freehold," so to speak, diminished almost to a vanish- 
ing quantity, and for the same reasons as in Europe at a much 
earlier period, namely, the necessity of seeking protection of the 
strong against the outrages of the times when there was no public 
law and no government to whom to appeal. Landed property 
therefore passed into a few hands in exchange for the protection 
afforded to its original owners, and the lord's castle represented 
the same idea in Japan in 1868 as it had in France or in fact in 
Europe (except England) up to the outbreak of the French Revo- 
lution and the triumph and spread of its principles. A purely 
feudal tenure in Europe lapsed with the death of the holder and 
had to be renewed. Convenience, and in some cases necessity, 
14 



210 SAKURAMBO 

brought it about that in time custom made such tenures hereditary 
in the family of the tenant. That is, the title to property so passed 
practically returned to the original holder subject to certain duties 
thereto attached. These duties were paid either in personal service 
or in taxes of money or kind. Subject to restrictions — more or 
less severe according to the helplessness of the underling or 
tyranny of the overlord — a man's heirs inherited his property sub- 
ject to the same duties. The overlord being the State, he occupied 
the position it does to-day with some added drastic provisions, 
for he became the heir in cases where heirs were lacking, or were 
foreigners, or where defects had vitiated the holder's use. This 
last was the most irritating feature of such land held under feudal 
tenure even where so modified by custom as to imply heirship, for 
such regulations were often vexatiously minute and of course all 
in favour of the overlord, who in addition to being a party to any 
dispute that would arise was judge of his own case. When there- 
fore times became more settled, it is seen that the land has practi- 
cally become divided between the Church and the barons, and 
original freeholders were few and far between and in such few 
cases strictly affiliated with the noble class. In Europe the great 
free cities or corporations arose, but these latter find no represen- 
tation in Japan. Land was now largely held and worked by the 
people at large under the form of ground rent or of simple lease. 
The first was strictly hereditable and the holder in those days was 
protected in his rights against every one but his lord, and the 
peasantry would occupy from generation to generation the same 
farmstead. The duties had mainly been converted into taxes of 
money and kind but. labour in the form of the corvee or its equiva- 
lent wasstill required from the peasantry. Since the French Revo- 
lution even the form of forced labour has been removed, although 
permission is given to the rural holder in some countries to work 
out his road taxes instead of paying money. The State having 
now assumed the position of the feudal baron, all relations between 
the owner of the land and the user of it have now entirely dis- 
appeared, and the relation between them has assumed a purely 



SHINANO WAY 211 

commercial aspect. Some remnants recently did exist in English 
legislation enforcing the old reversionary rights of the landlord as 
in the case of copyhold for one or more lives. 

The land in Japan went through the same cycle of evolution. 
There were, however, in the old times of these villages, and entirely 
apart from any harshness or exactions of the lord of the soil, 
obligations and restraints fastened on the inhabitants that have 
made their effects felt to this day in their habits and business rela- 
tions. Some of the original forms still survive in out of the way 
places, as in public notices that frugality is to be practised in the 
village for the coming year. And perhaps the lax idea of contract 
found in so many phases all through everyday Japanese life can 
be attributed to these former customs. The life was strictly a life 
of the community. Nothing could be done without the knowledge 
and consent of the community. A lease or sale of house or ground 
required the consent of family and neighbours as attested by their 
seals to the document. In many villages sale of land was abso- 
lutely forbidden under any condition. In other cases this prohibi- 
tion existed but was evaded by a sort of perpetual lease clause by 
which the vendor or his heirs could always step in and repurchase 
after a certain number of years. Particularly in towns there was 
often a proviso that the lease of a house must first be submitted to 
neighbours, and then, if they consented to the presence of the 
newcomer, the lease became valid. And beyond all was the un- 
comfortable position of the bankrupt debtor; the man who failed 
to fulfil his obligations. We can understand something of the 
tenderness shown by Japanese courts to the debtor when we appre- 
ciate the latter's condition. In fact, the professional money-lender 
— on interest — found small, favour. The orders for a private settle- 
ment of money disputes, payment on instalment extending over 
long terms of years, the ready acceptance of excuse for non-pay- 
ment provided it was shown that an honest endeavour had been 
made to meet the debt, the issuance from time to time of private 
settlement orders which were really statutes of limitation abolishing 
all debts previous to the proclamation, emphasize this position of the 



212 SAKURAMB6 

debtor. The bankrupt was a marked man. He lost caste. He was 
in most places deprived of all voice in village or town affairs, some- 
times for life. His descendants could not hold certain offices for 
several generations. He was forbidden to use an haori, or outside 
coat, on any occasion, or to use a rain hat. In some extreme cases 
he was driven from the place and a hut erected on waste land nearby 
in which he must dwell. There were entire settlements of such 
broken-down men, on the outskirts of large villages. At best he 
either entered the family of a relative as a subordinate, or his 
family took care of wife and children while he was exiled or lived 
this degraded separate life. Bankruptcy therefore involved not only 
loss of goods but grave social and political penalties, and the Court 
properly took great care in forcing matters to an extremity. The 
whole system must have reacted very strongly on the body politic 
in cramping- enterprise, for the capitalist would be timid in advanc- 
ing money for new enterprises, or he would cover losses by high 
interest rates, and this seems to have been the case as the many 
laws against usury show. Responsibility, however, was wide and 
the endorsing seal of the village authorities in many cases made 
them, or even the village, responsible for the debt contracted. 

When the central government replaced the daimyo govern- 
ment, the yeoman farmer or goshi had practically disappeared. He 
was rara avis or rather, as great landholder, amalgamated with 
the noble classes. The land was held by the peasants under 
ground-rent or lease. It passed by regular law of succession with 
the same reversionary rules in case of failure on the part of the 
leaseholder, and the same defect that the lord became judge in any 
cause of dispute which arose between him and his peasantry. One 
can understand therefore that the revolution and the transfer to the 
central government Avas by no means the shock to the whole 
economic system that at first sight appears. The central govern- 
ment took the place of the daimyo just as in France, Republic 
displaced Empire, or vice versa. Not a peasant was ousted from 
his holding. He paid his rent to the government tax office instead 
of to the lord's steward, and he gained infinitely bv the change inas- 



SHINANO WAY 213 

much as the landlord was now the community, and he knew that 
the taxes were levied for actual purposes of government, and not 
to support the extravagances of some faineant in Yedo. While 
theoretically the Government is the real owner of all the land, the 
title rests in the registered holder of the land who has all the power 
now of using it and devising it found in western legislation of the 
most recent date, and subject only to the general impost and taxa- 
tion and to the laws of succession. In the same way these many 
country villages that the traveller passes in his journeys have 
changed their basis of government with as little friction as the 
change of ownership of the land. The ancient system has prac- 
tically been continued in its outer form to the present day, the 
changes being superficial and in the direction of centralization. 
The responsibility of the family for its members has largely dis- 
appeared, and in so far a movement has been made in the direction 
of individuality. Division of small groups of houses with a re- 
sponsible chief, further groupings into wards, into districts, and 
into still larger divisions for representation in a general council. 
The basis of all these councils is wealth, not manhood suffrage. 
A man must have reached a certain age — twenty-five years — must 
pay a certain proportion of national tax, must fulfil certain per- 
sonal qualifications as to character, and must not be of the official 
class. A person disqualified by conviction under the penal code 
or a bankrupt cannot be an elector. Great attention is paid to 
form, and the various systems of registrations fixing a man's 
status are very complete. They are practically a police provision, 
and, accounting for every individual in a household, much simplify 
police work. Property ciualification to be an elector do not stop 
simply at the statement of tax paid. The list of electors is divided 
according to tax paid by them. The wealthier interests represent- 
ing one-half the tax assessment of the place elect half the council 
members, the balance of the electors choose the other half of the 
council. The elections are arranged so that half the council is 
renewed at each election, thereby constituting a permanent body. 
The body so formed possesses functions not very different from 



214 SAKURAMBO 

those found in western communities. They regulate their village 
affairs, and it falls on them to distribute the taxes assessed against 
the commune. Their decisions, however, are subject to appeal to 
the sub-prefect and prefect of the arrondissement or province, who 
can also check them up on his own initiative. Hence they are 
brought into direct contact with the central government which has 
constant watch over their actions. Their head, the mayor, holds 
a double relation in this respect, for while he is the executive of the 
council to carry out their regulations and is elected by them, he is 
also the representative of the Government which transmits its will 
through him not as mayor but as its local representative, whether 
in relation to acts of the council or to general acts which are to 
be promulgated. It can be seen that the only change in village 
political life here lies in this limited suffrage for the election of the 
council, and which although much restricted in its operation, car- 
ries a germ of individualism in its recognition of interest as 
separate from the famil5^ 

Politics therefore are not such as to create a furor on such 
ground as this and the village life passes as tranquilly and much as 
in our own country villages. Work in the field all day and at night- 
fall the home-coming. The women, when they do not work side by 
side \vith the men, are employed in household duties, spinning silk, 
drying grain, washing vegetables for market, and other such duties 
to add to the exchequer. The hours of work over, there is a good 
deal of mutual " dropping in " to each other's houses, general 
gossip in which the local scandal is pretty thoroughly thrashed out 
in a country where nothing can be kept secret, and story-telling for 
which the Japanese have a great attraction and a deserved reputa- 
tion, practice in this and in making little poems having reached 
much farther down into the social strata than in the busier West. 
In public their main amusements are the temple fairs or matsuri. 
Here there is a marked difference from western life. They have 
indeed in Japan days of public holiday, such as the accession and 
death of Jimmu Tenno, the first Emperor and the birthday of the 
present Emperor; generally observed but without those public 



SHINANO WAY 215 

meeting-s, reviews, and display customary in the West on the great 
national holidays. They have no place set aside for sports. The 
Japanese boy and young man tramps the country, has a name for 
every flower and insect, but knows nothing of base-ball leagues 
and cricket clubs. The village green is absolutely lacking as a 
feature of Japanese village life. The Japanese are still back in the 
Middle Ages, where every amusement had its being in the church 
life, and where the feast days and saints' days marked the fairs and 
the miracle plays. So their life is centred in the temple to which 
every Japanese has the peculiar relation of iiji ko or adopted child, 
having been placed under the guardian care of the divinity in his 
babyhood, and these temple celebrations are entered into with a 
zest enhanced by its peculiar relation to the worshippers. These 
celebrations take many forms, from the monthly fair which is 
mainly important to a host of small pedlars who spread their wares 
out to the public gaze, to elaborate ceremonials which have their 
representatives in the harvest festivals still practised in many parts 
of Europe, and of which some remnants remain in England and 
America, where, however, they have lost all religious signification. 
These brown thatched roofs have much of interest under them, 
and perhaps some day a Japanese Balzac or Scott or Dickens will 
arise to tell their story to the world. A short run across the plain 
brought the big city of Nagano into view, and soon I was enjoying 
the well-meant if somewhat unkempt hospitality of the local 
" hotel." 

Once more I paid a visit to the great Zenkoji temple. This 
time the grounds were not crowded with the pilgrims and their 
dirty white robes. The rosary and • charm shops seemed more 
open for form's sake and Ojisan was gossiping with his neighbour 
or his newspaper with apparently any thought in his mind but his 
spiritually valuable wares. Then I took my way through the long 
street of inns and shops to the railway station. It was noon before 
we were moving down the beautiful Chickumagawa valley, and 
evening by the time the slopes of Asamayama were reached and the 
sacred portals of the Chautauqua of Japan. We remember how 



216 SAKURAMBO 

Daudet describes his return to Tarascon and the shock of fear that 
made him shiver when its spires and white walls came suddenly 
in sight. Now for some reason foreigners in Japan seem to be 
divided into the ringstreaked and spotted and the unspotted, the 
sheep and the goats. The missionaries on the one hand and " the 
rest " on the other hand. There is of course a radical difference 
between the two flocks as to who are the sheep and who are the 
goats, a point on which no compromise seems possible. Hence it 
is that the stranger wanders into the fold of either very much as in 
days of old he approached some baron's castle, somewhat uncer- 
tain as to whether he was to be consigned to the oblivion of the 
wine cup or of the oubliette. At Karuizawa, however, the stranger 
has no such experiences and has excellent hotels. There is no 
" committee " on hand to inspect credentials and to cast the un- 
worthy into outer darkness again. No Excourbanies with his 
" Fen de Brut — let's make a noise." The rightful owners had not 
emigrated however. It is the season of the locust at Karuizawa 
and the locust had not yet arrived. This little town, with its spruce 
new and ugly little houses set out on the scrub-covered plain, repre- 
sents a question of the East — not so much of Japan, for in this 
sturdy little nation it is a mere exotic. For one of the mooted 
questions of profit and loss to these nations in their contact with 
western civilization is the missionary. The charges brought 
against the missionary propaganda in the East, and by men who 
certa'inly should be qualified to know more about the question than 
those living on the other side of the globe, ranges from its useful- 
ness in an economic point of view to simple diatribes against the 
character and methods of the men who carry it on. There are 
about two hundred thousand Christians in Japan and it is charged 
with much show of truth that the amount of money spent is utterly 
out of proportion to such meagre results; that the suffering and 
distress that is found at home calls for relief, and it is a strange 
bias to give religion to overlook the misery at one's doors and to 
relieve it under such distant conditions. The usual answer made 
seems to be grounded somewhat on the indisputable fact that large 



SHINANO WAY 217 

numbers of people at home do neglect their plain duty, which, if 
they carried it out, would much diminish such suffering, and that 
those who feel it their call to work in foreign lands are not to be 
held responsible for such dereliction of others or to be called on 
to take their places. The suffering and helpless at home seem, we 
might conclude, to be caught between the upper and nether mill- 
stone in this case. Those who contribute to foreign missions 
certainly have a right to say in what direction they shall turn their 
charity. They claim it is their concern. Criticism and answer 
seem both to be firmly grounded in their opposite camps. A more 
serious charge, however made, is that of insincerity. The state- 
ment that men on the ground know the real condition of affairs, 
know that the net returns do not warrant the money that is poured 
into these eastern countries, and could much better be spent at home. 
Now it seems to me that in this case the professional enthusiasm is 
not sufficiently taken into account. The outsider can far more 
accurately gauge the progress of the battle than the man who is 
engaged in it. The missionary in the thick of a fight, in which, to 
his honour be it said, in the vast majority of cases he is engaged 
heart and soul, is very likely to look at his triumphs through a 
microscope. He is struggling against great odds, not only in- 
herent in the situation itself, but without the assistance or against 
the implied ill will of those he feels should be among his supporters. 
For it is a curious fact how universally they apply the saying, " he 
who is not for me is against me." 

Now the heat of controversy is likely to make every weapon 
at hand useful, and only on this ground can be explained some of 
the statements we hear made by missionaries from western pulpits. 
We hear much of benighted heathen, worship of frightful gods, and 
ignorance. At this very day the western papers are full of ser- 
mons and letters of this character, and of which Japan is the subject 
and in which the picture is drawn from such statements of men 
who know the exaggeration of the portrait. Men who live in the 
East know that the priesthood of the eastern religions contains men 
as learned as any we have in the West; they know that the dis- 



218 SAKURAMBO 

torted countenance of Emma O and of the Nyo before the temples 
is an artistic conception as famihar to these eastern peoples as any 
statue of the saints to a western man; and they know that igno- 
rance and superstition are quite as rife in Italy, in Spain, in Russia, 
as in Japan. You never hear from the western pulpit of the 
learned priest or the accomplished gentleman. You do hear a 
lot of stone idols, and of worship of dogs and cows, as if these were 
the essentials of the eastern religions ; and as if Lourdes and 
Loretto, and the worship of images and of old Roman gods under 
the thin disguise of harvest festivals, were never heard of in western 
theology. This is plain misrepresentation and not overscrupulous 
at that. 

Another charge of misrepresentation brought against the mis- 
sionaries is their exaggeration of the conditions under which they 
live, and which are at least as pleasant as any they would be entitled 
to at home. That can hardly be called exile which men voluntarily 
seek. Many people living in the East return home, but many of 
them find " exile " so agreeable that they soon drop back again. 
People living in China usually speak well of it, and people living 
in Japan are living under conditions that are so pleasant that to 
many they counterbalance the charms of western life, the music, 
the beautiful art of the West, the gay complex outdoor life of 
Continental Europe. , The average of chances must be taken, and 
such average, for instance, in the United States would land a rhan 
in some small inland town where amusements are slight and 
interest very circumscribed. It is certainly not a bad exchange 
for such a man to find himself in a country town in Japan, where 
the people in their daily life present a perfect kaleidoscope of 
physical and mental colour strange to his eyes. Add to this the 
fact that one dollar in America is worth three dollars in a Japanese 
country town. I have in mind a case where the minister of a little 
parish received the munificent salary of two hundred and ninety 
dollars a year together with an occasional barrel of apples and a 
bag of flour from his wealthier parishioners. On this he and his 
family were supposed to get along for the year, and it can be added 



SHINANO WAY 219 

that his receipts in kind were fairly balanced by the calls made 
on his little store by his more needy parishioners. Such a man 
certainly would not find himself badly off in Japan. Statements 
so often made as to eastern learning and living could well stand 
much qualification. With charges of ignorance of the language 
of the people they come to teach, and general overbearing manners 
in their relations to the community, I think few will agree. Fresh 
timber sent out from home is of course ignorant of the language, 
and often displays an overconfidence in abilities and anything 
but humility toward the task of raising the naked savages to 
whose regeneration they propose to devote themselves. This, 
however, is quite as often found among other than missionary 
recruits. As a matter of fact the missionaries are better cjualified 
to speak on this question of language than the large majority of 
secular foreigners living in Japan, many of whom content them- 
selves with learning enough for daily use and leave the rest to 
a banto. The missionary, however, must learn the language for a 
widely extended sphere. It is his means of usefulness. As to 
rudeness, there are black sheep in every flock, but I think most 
travellers will endorse the statement that they have always received 
kindness and courtesy from the missionary section whenever they 
have had occasion to apply for their assistance. 

It is an undoubted fact, however, that the general feeling of 
resident foreigners in the East is hostile to the missionary estab- 
lishment. The preceding grounds are very general. Perhaps 
stronger reasons can be found in the opposition of the missionaries 
themselves to foreign traders. They openly denounce their influ- 
ence on their flock and try by every means — presumably legitimate 
— to reserve the field for themselves. Instances of this elsewhere 
are familiar enough, in Hawaii and at present in Samoa. The 
Mission Boards are very powerful bodies, and making their influ- 
ence felt in this way it is no wonder that they arouse hostility in 
powerful commercial interests whose object is to carry trade every- 
where with small reference to the good or evil of the native. In 
addition there is among the western Germanic nations a distinctly 



220 SAKURAMBO 

hostile feeling" to priest government or influence. They have freed 
themselves from it at home with great cost of blood, and would 
stamp it out everywhere if they had the power. One of the most 
valuable means of influence that the missionary possesses is his 
personal influence over his parishioners in their homes. It is 
noticeable that the nationals of countries in which the Protestant 
creeds are predominant show their hostility more than those from 
countries in which the Roman Church is the predominant form of 
worship. The latter rarely offer open criticism to their own 
missions, no matter how openly they may express themselves as to 
mission work in general. It seems to me that there is another 
influence, or rather a lack of it, also at work. A man naturally 
pays deference to his surroundings no matter whether he agrees or 
not with the majority. In the East the free thinker or indifferent- 
ist has no such surroundings that would arouse sympathy even in 
the absence of belief. The church around which a man's life has 
centred, and beneath whose shadow his parents perhaps lie buried, 
always stands as a landmark in his life's journey. In the East 
it is the pagoda not the spire that points heavenward. It is his 
material present not the shadowy past that he has under his eyes. 

The relations between missionaries and other resident foreign- 
ers are, however, of but little moment as compared with the really 
important cjuestion c^f the relation between the missionaries and the 
native. In the past ages of the world's history, religion and 
politics have gone close hand in hand. There have been more wars 
based on religious pretexts than on any other grounds, and it is 
only since the French Revolution and the era of colonial expansion 
that wars on purely political grounds have had their being. Guelph 
and Ghibelline, Catholic and Huguenot, England, Holland and the 
Protestant princes of Germany against Spain, all have made religion 
a pretext of their alliances with or their encroachments on each 
other. Now the religious spirit is just as much alive to-day as it ever 
was, only it has widened its range of toleration. The great bulk 
of mankind have not yet reached a point where broad general ethical 
rules can satisfy them. They must have something very concrete on 



SHINANO WAY 221 

which to hold. Hence toleration is only found within the confines 
of a religious creed. The Jesuits in China wdien they found them- 
selves confronted with a cult so strikingly like that left at home 
in precept and ritual did not attribute the likeness to certain quali- 
ties of thought inherent in the human mind and seeking the same 
external form of expression, but could only attribute the likeness 
to the machination of the devil for the deceiving of mankind. Re- 
ligion could spring from but one source, hence all outside forms 
must be heretical. By the free use of kicks and cuffs the nations 
of Europe have to some extent convinced each other that " God." 
" Gott," " Dios," " Dieu," are fair equivalents for the same idea. 
Whether the "e&!:(> " of the Russian Church implies the same is 
somewhat to be doubted if their attitude toward other Christian 
sects is any indication. When, however, we come to Mahomet 
and the sons of Mahomet, or to the gentle religion of Buddha, or 
the lofty ideals of esoteric Brahmanism, the only terms of peace are 
extinction. No convertible terms, no international exchange ex- 
ists. Difference in language symbols implies difference in ideas. 
The Protestant may find a cloak of charity to cover the hosts of 
Saints, national, international, and local, of his Catholic brother. 
At least they can be held to be holy men and women deserving of 
praise, if not of worship. The saintly followers of Buddha, how- 
ever, are per se representative of the fiend himself, snares to entrap 
men, and their holy lives but one of the devil's lures to entice 
men into them. 

The statesmen of the w^estern world were not long in finding 
out the use of the missionary spirit inherent in every religion. 
For ages the flag of commerce has followed the Cross. Not that 
this has ever pleased the ecclesiastical authorities engaged in the 
propaganda of the faith. The Jesuits of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
century saw with just as little pleasure the descent of mercantile 
Europe on China and Japan as the Hawaiian missionaries did 
the influx of the haole or European in the nineteenth, and as the 
missionaries in Samoa oppose the extension of European contact 
with the native in this twentieth century. But the ecclesiastics of 



222 SAKURAMBO 

the West were never willing to forego the support of their home 
power, to become a part of the population. The religion they 
wished to implant was the religion of the West, and they had no 
intention of leaving its interpretation to inexperienced neophytes. 
Now our western religions are not a Napoleonic code laid down on 
certain strict principles. They are a growth and a compromise 
with much that has preceded them. The missionary in the East, 
however, was, and is, confronted with a situation which in his eyes 
admits of no compromise. It would not have been an insuperable 
matter to replace the coarse nature worship by a more idealized con- 
ception of divinity. Nature worship, however, is only a part and 
not the most important part of religion as it has developed in 
China and Japan. The main basis on which all religious feeling 
exists is ancestor worship. A tie, be it observed, that affects the 
family not the individual, and on which the whole economic struct- 
ure involving property has been built. Of course time had built 
around this family altar a number of rites and observances, and it 
has always been a nice point as to how far the convert could join 
in such acts without peril to his soul. The early Jesuits, who had a 
very considerable knowledge of the workings of the mind of the 
native and his methods of thought, approached this subject in what 
seems the most rational manner. Seeking the essentials and leav- 
ing to time the elimination of the last traces of any religious mean- 
ing attached to the ancestral tablets. This course has not been 
followed, however, even by their own co-religionists, and all the 
Christian bodies are agreed that no compromise is possible on that 
point, that the native is not to be trusted to excise the religious 
element in his observance before the ihai. Now as all the members 
of the family owe certain religious duties to these ancestral tablets 
and contribution to the support of the family worship, and as these 
duties form part of the legal code, it can be seen that the missionary 
is soon brought into contact with the law of the land. He has 
reduced not only the whole family to disorder but has introduced 
disorder into the wider circle of the governing power. To this 
of course he has no objection. He falls back on the authority that 



SHINANO WAY 223 

Christianity brought " not peace into the world, but a sword." 
The greater the disturbance the more likely he is to profit, and the 
connection between gunboats and missionaries has been by no 
means an exceptional feature in China where he is a person outside 
the law of the land, qualified to interfere in it but not subject to it. 
In Japan, where gunboats and collisions with the Government are 
not possible, it is fair to presume that the radical stand in regard 
to the ancestral tablets has had great effect. Certainly if the 
headship of a family fell by the law of succession to a Christian 
he would be in a dilemma. Besides, his Christianity in itself carries 
a dilemma with it. The Japanese are a very tolerant people — as yet. 
They care very little as to whether their neighbour has consorted 
with strange gods or not. But the gratuitous insult to all their best 
and most sacred feelings such as is involved in the destruction of 
the ihai is more than they can stand, and involves to the individual 
the most savage ostracism. To them it is as if one insulted " the 
Host " in a Catholic country. 

The Japanese, if sincere, should make splendid ground to 
work upon. As has been said, he is not irreligious but on the con- 
trary his realism as to divinity is carried to the extreme. By the 
beliefs of his childht)od the gods and the dead are constant com- 
panions, sharing the good things of this earth with the living and 
haunting its favoured spots. You rarely see carelessness of pose 
and manner during the act of devotion. As man, woman, or child, 
clap their hands before the temple the previously careless manner 
becomes one of great absorption. There is often a touch of feeling 
where its presence would not be suspected. It is not uncommon 
to see a workman at his bench, a coolie walking beside the road, 
break into an impassioned soliloquy or into some old song, abso- 
lutely losing himself in impersonation. Recitation is a favourite 
form of entertainment with them and few are those who have not a 
whole store of old legends and folklore tales at their tongues' end. 
But if he has deep feeling he has also deep craft, and often very 
little scruple. Many of the English-speaking girls found in the 
brothels of the open ports have been sent to the missionary school 



224 SAKURAMBO 

with the specific object of thus enhancing their value by this 
accompHshment. The natiye church gives no end of anxiety. A 
thinking, earnest people, they naturally object to being held in lead- 
ing strings, and as naturally the foreign boards are disinclined to 
turn over to them large funds left for a specific purpose by the 
donors, and which in the hands of the native race are just as likely 
in the end to be devoted to supporting dogmas trying to reconcile 
belief east and west, as to maintaining to the last gasp the damna- 
tion of infants and such other mortals who did not happen to agree 
with the Geneva Sage. It is hardly necessary to say that historical 
Christianity would appeal but little to the Japanese. There can be 
none of the appeals to the glorious part the Church has played in 
the past, and the vicarious association by such connection with such 
a past. The only appeal to the Japanese can be to his mind or to 
his interest. In the days of old when the Jesuits first came to 
Japan they were in the midst of the feudal ages when the people 
body and soul were pretty much the property of the prince. These 
astute practitioners quickly grasped that point familiar to them in 
other fields, and hence their first efforts were directed to making 
converts among the ruling classes. Such dragooning while not 
very edifying had a great effect on the census but also a great effect 
on their future. The great triumvirate — Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, 
lyeyasu — plainly lool^ed on Christianity in a purely political light. 
Buddhism had already given great trouble in the land. In a relig- 
ious sense Christianity could be a very convenient makeweight 
against the pretensions of the older religion. But as soon as 
Christianity threatened to become a question of politics through 
its relation with the daimyo — which connection seems more to 
have been anticipated from its known history which had reached 
the ears of Hideyoshi and lyeyasu, rather than any real attempt to 
play a part in the politics of the country — they stamped it out 
relentlessly and thoroughly, not to reappear until Perry's fleet again 
opened the land to the West. Modern missionary effort has no 
dragooning methods at its back, and its present efforts seem to the 
outsiders rather to have been hampered in the nature of a shock to 



SHINANO WAY 225 

the prejudices of what at bottom is a highly emotional people. 

That the propaganda of modern Christianity carries with it 
germs of great advantage to the future of Japan I think will be 
admitted by most of those who have seen the present application of 
foreign civilization on their new ground. It has, and will materially 
alter the status of the Japanese woman from that of a breeding 
machine to become the helpmate and the complement of man. It 
has, and will greatly influence the organization of charity toward 
assisting the needy classes. The Japanese under their old system 
never developed relief work as it has developed strictly under the 
brotherhood idea fostered essentially by Christianity. The needy 
members of a family fell to the care of the better situated of their 
kin, but in many cases it is evident that there would here occur 
examples of general misfortune that were not reached. This 
limiting the sense of responsibility within the family narrowed 
• its development materially. Only in cases of general peril, where 
the bread-winners were away fighting for the common weal, would 
the community's feeling of brotherhood be aroused in the sense 
that makes it in the West the duty of the State to look after its 
needy members. There is a change in Japanese thought in this 
respect, and, it can be claimed, due to missionary influence. 
Orphanages, asylums for lepers and incurables, generally speaking, 
are more and more occupying the upper classes. Again, under the 
Christian propaganda the man not the family is the important feat- 
ure. Man is made the valuable unit, and as you increase his 
personal sense of responsibility to a God, you will undoubtedly 
increase his value as a man. This to me seems the most valuable 
feature, to the Japanese, of Christianity to their country. This 
developing the sense of individuality, the lack of which cannot help 
striking the most casual pilgrim through the land. Apart entirely 
from any question of religion, Christianity on the purely ethical side 
has shown features in which the systems in force were lacking. It 
has presented its credentials and their value appears in the results. 

Religion as a question of economics seems necessarily polemi- 
cal. It seems impossible not to be drawn into the whirlpool of 

15 



226 SAKURAMBO 

dogmatic controversy. If anything has nothing to do with rehg- 
ion, is bound down strictly to the examination of fact, it is science. 
Science has nothing to do with speculative processes incapable of 
proof. Even her own hypotheses and theories are simply means 
to enlarge her viewpoint of fact. Means that are to be rejected at 
once as soon' as they fail in their effect. And yet the greatest of all 
controversies is called that between Science and Religion. It is 
only fair to say that science is but little to blame for such contro- 
versy. Dogmatic religion has chosen to plunge into a contest over 
facts and usually with most disastrous results to itself. The fact 
that Galileo was right when he said that the earth moved around 
the sun and not vice versa, and that the geologists were right 
when they said that changes of level still going on were the cause 
of sea shells being found on the mountain slopes and were no 
evidence of a universal flood, had much to do with lowering the 
confidence of men in religious dogma. It was a very important 
fact to catch religion palpably in the wrong. Wrong in one thing 
it could Avell be wrong in many things. Now many things have 
been laid down in religious dogma and many constructions of the 
old Hebrew books have been given the force of religious law. 
Strictly speaking, in religion — the only instance in western civil- 
ization — a standard akin to that of the Chinese system has been 
developed. The classical period of The Church is right and devia- 
tion from the tenets then laid down is in itself evidence of wrong. 
This of course has led in these days of free investigation to some 
frightful collapses of old authority. The Fathers of the Church 
wrote with anything but a knowledge of the material world, but 
managed to weave the material so into the theological that it is 
hard to separate them without pulling the whole structure to the 
ground. One great religious body has recognized this, and relying 
on its compact and dictatorial organization has placed a limit on 
such investigation. The Pope's encyclical letter in July, 1870, 
on infallibility, seemed to be a Bull of the Middle Ages in this' 
Age of Iron. And yet the Roman Hierarchy knew their ground. 
The Bull would drive a certain group of men out of the Church — 



SHINANO WAY 227 

its best and strongest element — but their continuance in it under 
the existing conditions meant a disruption of the Church's organ- 
ization. In the first instance the Church was an organization and 
rested on the authority of the past. That authority could not be 
made a subject of investigation. 

The land as yet lies open to the Philistine but I take my leave 
of Karuizawa at a fair hand-gallop, remembering the excellent 
practice of Panurge, who under circumstances of danger " ran 
away as fast as he could, for fear of blows, whereof he was 
naturally fearful." 



VII 



FROM BUNGO TO HISEN 

" II mondo e la rappresentazione della sensibilita e del 
pensiero di pochi uomini superior!, i quali lo hanno 
creato e quindi ampliato e ornato nel corso del tempo 
e andramo sempre piu ampliandolo nel futuro." 

Rjomansi del Giglio. 

Of the maii}^ delightful Japanese inns — particularly so in the 
pleasant spring and summer season — that of Miyajima, the Momi- 
jiya (Maple Inn) holds first rank. It is, literally speaking, distrib- 
uted along the sides of a little ravine. The detached cottages of 
which it consists are hidden away among the hundreds of maples, 
and picturescjue little waterfalls, kiosks, bridges, and toro or stone 
lanterns, make up a most charming picture. Miyajima is always 
delightful, so much so that one could wish it transported to some 
other part of the island empire, where it could be enjoyed in peace 
and freedom. Individually speaking, it has about as much strat- 
egic value as the thousand islands of the Saint Lawrence, but 
unfortunately it is in the Inland Sea. The Japanese military man 
in his sphere of action, must have something on which to scribble 
a report. If there is no opportunity he will create the opportunity. 
He who thinks he is going to ramble unchecked through the classic 
shades of Miyajima will soon find himself pulled up; so carefully 
do they follow every foreigner through this district that it is matter 
of surprise that the railway carriages do not carry a guard. It is 
only fair to say that they wrap a good deal of velvet around the 
strangers' chains so that they do not gall. The out-and-out mili- 
tary man is infinitely preferable to the civilian official who in places 
has to act for him. Miyajima is mainly famous, however, not for 
its inn but for its Shhito temple and particularly for the great torii 
standing far out in the inlet at the head of which the temple has 

been erected. This stands on piles, and when the tide and moon 
228 



SHINANO WAY 229 

are full, as viewed from the head of the little bay the picture is 
exquisitely beautiful. Nevertheless there is something lacking 
in the scene. After all it is simply and solely the work of men's 
hands, not the inspiration of a great idea. Strip it of its surround- 
ings and all the defects of the somewhat scjuat outline, the irregu- 
larity of arrangement of the component buildings force themselves 
on the eye. It has been said that to judge the beauty of the Jap- 
anese temple properly one should see it under just such conditions 
of light and shadow. This is most certainly true, but even then 
we would not compare it seriously to the splendid Duomo of Milan, 
a lacework in stone with its hundreds of minaret-like spires, its 
white marble shining like silver in the moonlight. The one is the 
beauty of the jewel box in which is preserved things earthly, the 
other the beauty of a great shrine in which is embodied man's 
ideal of things heavenly. One could as readily compare the bijou 
palaces of the Pare Monceaux with the Louvre. The temple at 
Miyajima of course has the usual misty history of Things Japanese, 
but its real history seems to date from the days of Taira Kiyomori 
and that was a bare eight hundred years ago. The island itself is 
in the middle of one of those great red splotches on the map of 
the Imperial Geological Survey, and which represents that ex- 
tremely durable material, granite. It is a very rotten rock here, 
mainly made up of feldspar, and wherever exposed is so badly 
disintegrated as to readily crumble under the pressure of the 
fingers. 

It was nearly noon when I tore myself away from the local 
attractions, and, once more crossing by the tiny steam ferry that 
runs to the mainland, found room on the southbound train. The 
Japanese have imported, as we know, many western traits, some 
of which could very well be dispensed with. The " train hog " 
is well known in all parts of the world. He is an animal that 
flourishes even under adverse circumstances. He is by no means 
unknown in Japan and a large part of the genus are of the native 
species. There is the same indisposition to make any movement 
of their goods and chattels so carefully disposed as to afford them a 



230 SAKURAMBO 

maximum of room and comfort even in the face of a crowded 
train. The trio on which Mr. Pickwick was " chummed '' — the 
Leg, the Butcher, and the hirsute Mr. Smangle — are accommoda- 
tion itself compared to many of these worthies. All Japanese carry 
a huge rug in travelling, and the first thing these gentry do is to 
dispose the rug over three or four seats, curl up on it and incon- 
tinently go to sleep. One would suppose they never got a chance 
anywhere else. There is no difficulty about adjusting such matters 
at the railway station where the station master and his subordinates 
look after the seating of the passengers. En route the guard is 
not seen and rarely takes the initiative anyhow. I much prefer 
the autocratic American " conductor." He is always passing up 
and down the train, the company's rules are strict, and a woman 
or child rarely has to appeal to him. His business is to know his 
train and his eagle eye soon catches up the trail of " the hog." 
He acts on his own initiative. '* God helps those who help them- 
selves," but the train conductor often swings the saying over into 
its proper application. There are two excellent Japanese inns at 
Bakan, one of them the Daikichi, being charmingly situated at the 
edge of the water. The view from here across the straits, by day 
or night, is beautiful. Unfortunately I landed in the middle of a 
festival combined with the advent of some notable, and the town 
was jammed. Under* the able guidance of my kurumaya we 
" did " the place as far as inns were concerned but without effect. 
Moji, on the other side of the strait, is not attractive looking. It 
is the port for shipping coal and is as dirty as such a business would 
warrant. The hotel is by no means bad, and would be much better 
if they abandoned foreign style and confined their guests to Jap- 
anese apartments. The food was excellent but the European rooms 
were intolerable even for Japan. The service was the haphazard 
service of a boy who was usually occupied elsewhere. People must 
be very careful in their movements in this district. All sketching, 
photographing, or anything in which pen or pencil is concerned, is 
absolutely forbidden and certain to bring down unpleasant conse- 
quences. Attendant circumstances never figure in the case. The 



SHINANO WAY 231 

Japanese official is strictly bound down to . formula and drives it 
even to the limits of absurdity. To him the role of Dogberry is 
perfectly legitimate. 

It was raining miserably when I got away from Mo j i the next 
morning. Black puddles, grimy awnings, dirty faces were the 
main features stamped on my mind. Even the rain drops carried 
their little burden of coal dust to deposit its stain wherever it fell, 
and badly did the foreigner's sun hat need pipeclaying after Moji's 
sayonara. A sun hat, by the way, is very convenient in Kyushu 
at a much earlier season than at Kyoto or Tokyo. Th^ kiisoshizvo 
or Asiatic gulf stream, makes the climate of the South island much 
warmer. To some degree this enhances the beauty of this part 
of the Empire. The green certainly seems richer and more luxuri- 
ant than in other parts of Japan, and adds an interest to scenery 
otherwise much like that found elsewhere in the islands. I 
stopped off at Nakatsu to make a side trip to the Habakei valley 
some ten miles distant, a course which cannot, however, be recom- 
■mended. The scenery was pretty but can be matched in a score 
of places in northern and central Japan. The Shofuken at Nakatsu 
can be spoken of more enthusiastically. It was a pretty little inn 
and the tiny Japanese garden was a grand rest to the eye after 
my late somewhat crude entertainment. Japanese love of Nature 
is singularly complete. They are equally at home on the country- 
side and in their gardens on which a whole system of aesthetics 
has been built. Every stone, the emplacement of every object, is 
related to the whole which must be read aright to grasp its mean- 
ing. The Japanese will find in his garden something that will 
mimic perhaps some far distant scene, and will promptly scribble off 
a poem from the mental vision aroused in his mind's eye. The 
appeal is to the contemplative side of man's nature, hence the avoid- 
ance of violent contrasts and equally of the maddening regularity 
w^hich sets all one's mathematical faculties, always troublesome 
as far as they exist, to trying to detect some break in their faultless 
lines and curves. 

The jumping off place of this particular branch line of rail- 



232 SAKURAMBO 

way is — or was — Usa. Here I landed toward evening to find my- 
self in the midst of a number of Japanese inns and tea-houses 
clustered around the terminus. My destination was the Wakaya, 
of which I knew nothing beyond the fact that it did not even rise 
to the dignity of a star in the guide-book. My ricksha man seemed 
a little startled, but we were loaded into his vehicle, making with 
the bag a fair armful, and started off through the dirtiest town I 
have seen in Japan. The streets were broken with great holes 
and gullies, which traffic and the previous rain had filled with a soft 
and unctuous mud in places a foot deep. This, however, was 
struggled through and off we started into the country. There 
seemed to be something palpably wrong here, so I held argument 
with my steed, which fortunately in this case could talk as 
much to the point as Balaam's ass. '* The Wakaya of 
Usa ? " He knew it well, and without further parley started off 
again for parts unknown. It was plain there was some dreadful 
mystery involved here, but as the place might be on the other side 
of the island and it was growing late, and as the idea of a second 
encounter with the mud was equally out of the question, I let him 
go on to accept what the gods should send me. And the gods 
were kind. After a ride of nearly three miles from the railway 
station we came to a beautiful little hamlet, shaded in the midst 
of a grove of cryptorrjieria and in front of which ran a pretty river. 
There was not a sign of the more vulgar occupations by which man 
puts bread in his mouth. No long approach of shops marred the way 
to the sanctuary of the gods. A large red lacquered bridge crossed 
the stream. This is barred and only for use of the emperor's 
envoy. Leaving the ricksha on the further side my man shouldered 
the bag and we descended to the river and crossed by a little foot- 
bridge nestled under the shadow of the more imposing structure. 
A few steps took me to the inn which I shall always regard as the 
gem of Japanese inns. It may be that the surprise of the place 
had something to do with it. After expecting so little and after 
the uninviting fishing town of Usa, the contrast was certainly very 
great. It was the off season, there were no guests but myself. 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 233 

Nominally I had the room of a dozen mats to myself. Really I 
had the whole inn which was thrown wide open to the summer 
breeze. The beautiful screens, the embossed finger recesses, the 
natural scroll work between the rooms, the beautiful polish given 
to beams and flooring, were all delights to the eye. And when 
nesan brought and served the tea the human ecjuipment was in 
keeping with the other surroundings. The tea was served in deli- 
cate little cups with just a suggestion of decoration on their surface, 
and no geisha- could have done the pouring out more gracefully 
than the maid of the inn. The shrines themselves, the cause of 
being of the hamlet, stand among the green trees in all their blaze 
of red. They are dedicated to that strenuous Emperor Ojin, of 
whom tradition gives the hint that he had his way to make good 
before he could write his title clear to the throne. Chuai, his 
father, who refused to obey the mandate of the gods to conquer 
Korea, probably because he was pretty busy in that line at home, 
has a shrine; as also that extraordinary but far more historical 
character Jingo, wife of Chuai, the reputed concjueror of the 
hermit kingdom. These shrines of Usa do indeed represent the 
ancient of days in Kyushu, that peculiar period of temporary trans- 
fer of power from Yamato to the South island which is a puzzle 
to Japanese historians. 

It is called twelve ri (thirty miles) to Beppu and it is at least 
ten ri (twenty-five miles). In the morning I started early with 
two men through a beautiful mountain country, and over a road 
that can be compared to the great Swiss roads. Japanese roads 
as a rule are a great lottery, mainly I think because they are most 
of them of local importance and their maintenance is looked after 
by the local authorities. They may be in good condition one year 
and barely passable the next. Even when good they are rarely 
more than a cart track. > There are other roads, however, which 
palpably show the hand of the central government, their use is 
national, and this Beppu road is one of them. Stone retaining 
walls, stone and iron bridges, broad and sweeping easy lines. 
There was no sacrifice of efficiency to expense. Hills were climbed 



234 SAKURAMBO 

at easy grades and not with the reckless disregard of the perpen- 
dicular so often the .case with Japanese roads. The drainage was 
also well looked after. Five and a half hours brought me into 
Beppu. I put up at the Hinagoya, one of the better class of 
Japanese inns. Beppu is a watering place, and at this particular 
time the season was " on " and the place full of people taking the 
baths. The inn baths were beautifully arranged with separate 
bathing for the sexes. The baths were large pools with cemented 
or stone sides and flooring around the bath. Everything was ex- 
quisitely clean. The most exacting foreigner could not complain 
of the food. They literally filled one to the neck, and then brought 
a most delicious concoction of turtle — dressed not unlike our terra- 
pin — for which the place is somewhat noted. A most dangerous 
lure to repletion. There are large public baths both at Beppu 
and at its suburb on the hill, Kannawa some three miles distant. 
The sexes all bathe here together, and the Garden of Eden state of 
affairs, this sort of undress assembly of Ojisan and Ohasan, so to 
speak, has its amusing features. Kannawa has a collection of hot 
water phenomena as interesting as Unzen. One sometimes gets 
startled out of their nonchalance when on thoroughly native soil. 
The Japanese peasant is often as much a product of Nature as any 
old cow being driven along the roadway. There are some things 
for which royalty itself can find no substitute. Discussion under 
circumstances of natural stress is embarrassing especially when the 
question of sex is a matter of indifference, not a mitigating factor. 
I had a long ride in front of me the next day to Takeda so took 
advantage of the electric tram line that runs beyond Oita to cover 
that much of my journey. It was a change from the more elegant 
establishment at Beppu, where there were several Japanese who 
spoke excellent English, to the quiet country inn at Oita. Every- 
thing, however, was very nice and clean, and my room at the back 
of the inn overlooked the river and a piece of flat country, which 
carried me back to some of the Dutch flats. A windmill would 
have made the illusion complete. For some reason the Japanese 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 235 

have made no use of that valuable motor power offered so freely to 
them by Nature. From Oita I made my start across the island, the 
first stage being through beautiful valley and mountain scenery. 
At times it was nature very much unadorned, and again through 
parklike scenery, or as near that type as Japan can get in spite of 
the paddy fields. Takeda is set in the centre of a tangle of hills, 
picturesquely wooded with charming little gorges, yet without the 
savagery attached to such scenery. We finally reached it by 
plunging through a tunnel, the usual method, for it is so forgotten 
in its hollow that the inhabitants have literally had to dig them- 
selves out into public notice. There are many beautiful waterfalls 
around the neighbourhood which well repays some little time being 
spent on it. Mine host kept a very small establishment, and inci- 
dentally ran a sort of grocery business in connection and probably 
more important to him than his inn. One evening I was here 
honoured by a visit of a delegation of students from the local school. 
It was not the first opportunity of thus coming in contact with the 
sprouting ideas of " Youngest Japan " in process of formation. 
These boys came to compare notes as to our various and varying 
views from our widely separated poles. The Japanese boy is dis- 
tinctly a product of his training. All boys necessarily are so ; but 
they, to me, lack so much of the spontaneity that we find in our 
western boys and which is not lacking in themselves in childhood 
that it can fairly be classed apart from race habit. For some time 
I had my house just above a large Japanese school, and in which 
the whole process went on daily under my eyes. To a western 
teacher such classes would seem ideal. Never a sign or word. 
Every boy as far as the rest of his companions were concerned 
was deaf, blind,, and dumb. His attention apparently was con- 
centrated on his book, and let us hope it was, for vacuity and such 
stillness would portend a disastrous outcome. Afterwards one 
could see them in the playground. The same primness. The only 
sign of schoolboy openness and spontaneity has been when two or 
three were seen walking together with arms thrown over each 
other's shoulders. The elder bovs seemed to take no interest or 



236 SAKURAMBO 

leadership in the games going on around them. They acted like 
undergrown men. Their relations with their schoolmates seemed 
very formal, almost businesslike you might call it. They have, it 
can be judged, a fixed code among themselves, and it should go 
hard with the boy who offended against that code. For thus early 
is every sign of individualism among them marked for extinction. 
It extinguishes every particle of generosity in their boy souls, by 
taking the adjustment of their difficulties out of their hands, and 
putting it into the charge of the general body of the students who 
like any other corporation or commonweal cannot sacrifice the prin- 
ciple to any emotional feeling. I cannot say I have ever been 
impressed by exhibition of that lively originality of thought that is 
not uncommon among American schoolboys. Almost bizarre 
ways of looking at their studies. The Japanese boys I have met — 
few enough to be sure — gave me the impression of " book 
crammed," and on their books, or rather the conclusions they drew 
from them, they had absolute reliance at an age where the ques- 
tioning mind would be expected. Their ideas on European politics 
were certainly fearfully and wonderfully made, and it was plain 
enough that they had not been urged to make use of originals. 
One feature was the almost erratic personal view they took of any 
subject of conversation. Necessarily in their minds it must apply 
to their country, and^if, in their opinion, the deductions were unfa- 
vourable thereto, their disbelief of the facts, while politely put, was 
sometimes uncomfortably direct. Even such a harmless and 
apparently safe subject as the water power available at Niagara 
Falls and its application met with this polite expression of doubt. 
I believe that I lost all credit entirely by the statement that the 
civilization around the Mediterranean dated back at least five thou- 
sand years. This was such a plain inference as to the brand- 
newness of the legendary Jimmu that the delegation shortly gave 
me up in disgust as a most unreliable sponge from which to squeeze 
any useful information. I think these interviews were rather a 
strain on all of us, especially the spokesman and myself. His 
English and my Japanese, dove-tailed together, hardly made a very 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 237 

lucid medium for our lofty themes, and they were probably roughly 
handled in the translation. But they were very nice boys, and the 
Takeda delegation were no exception. Quiet and well behaved. 
Among Japanese schoolboys I have never seen the fights and quar- 
rels that we regard as part of a boy's education to learn " to rough 
it " in the world and not to grow up a "milk-sop." They are 
settled in committee. It is a matter of choice and frankly I prefer 
the way our boys settle their quarrels. The grown world is not 
overly just in judging motives, and the undergrown world is hardly 
better equipped for that purpose. Boys' quarrels are as trivial as 
their interests and being personal are better settled " vi et armis " 
than in any other way. The public school sentiment among us 
will always see fair play and suppress the bully. Japanese boys 
are differently trained, at home and in school. Their school senti- 
ment seems to follow more the established laws of authority among 
them, and according as that is interpreted will the school senti- 
ment swing. There is too much room for wire pulling here. It is 
safer to trust to boys' hearts than their politics. The latter — 
politics, discontent with or dislike of a teacher — often sends these 
young self-appointed judges on strike, on which they refuse attend- 
ance until their wishes are complied with and the cause of offence 
remedied. We can imagine an American boy returning to his 
parents and informing them that he had struck. It can be opined 
the parent would strike too, and the boy elevated to his toes by the 
paternal clasp on his ear would march gingerly back to his duties, 
there to re-seat himself no matter how painful that operation might 
be to his soul — and body. 

It is a relief to get down to the younger members of this 
school community, and especially to the girls. The young seekers 
after knowledge of which we have been speaking are swelled with 
all manner of learning from heaven's high spheres to the dissection 
of the minutest bug. Like Mark Twain's " Jumping Frog " they 
are almost too loaded up to jump. Our children, however, are 
limited to three R's, which is dealt out to them in songs and folk- 
lore. Every fine day these little people from six to twelve years 



238 SAKURAMBO 

old, and girls up to sixteen years of age, are brought out to the 
school playground and there they go through a series of dances and 
drills, partly play and partly serious, a sort of " going to Jerusalem 
game," which it is a pleasure to watch so thoroughly do they enjoy 
it. They are carried out to the accompaniment of the songs, pleas- 
ant to the hearer, but when these songs rise from playground and 
classroom we can well doubt if the music does not mechanically 
carry the idea away with it, in one ear and out the other. There 
may be but little more result here in making children think, than 
in our rhymes arranged so as to give some sticking power to our 
history dates. The music to which these songs are set becomes 
very attractive and the voices are young, and fresh, and vigorous. 
They carry a moral tale — obedience to parents, loyalty to the- 
Emperor, some tale of folklore embodying one of these two quali- 
ties. I give the English of a few of them without any effort to 
give them the rhythmical measure of the original but merely to 
give an idea of the contents. 

1. As the tiniest grains of sand when piled together form a 
mountain as great as Fuji, so if we do not relax our efforts at last 
we can climb to the top of such a mountain. 

As the drops of water that overflow from the spring become 
a mighty river, so we, by adding every day a little to our progress, 
can advance as does the mighty Fujikawa. 

As the running of the mountain brook seeks to lose itself in the 
broad ocean, so by study our hopes will at last reach a sea as broad 
as that of Suruga. 

2. It is the sparrow that early in the morning, as the sun 
rises, remembers your kindness and rewards it with his bright clear 
voice — chu-chii-chii. 

3. To the dove, with its p6-po-p6, crying, '' Come, come down 
from the temple roof and eat of the feast of beans spread out. 
Eating, not to return at once, but crying po-p6-po, there to play. 

There is one very valuable feature of these Japanese schools 
which will well bear transplanting to America and to Eng- 
land where the idea of conscription is so particularly obnox- 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 239 

ions. Every boy (and girl) in these schools gets a thorough ele- 
mentary military drill. It interferes in no way with their studies. 
There is no reason why our boys should spend their whole recess 
hour in playing tag and other such games. The drill is excellent 
exercise in a physical sense. Many boys who take no exercise 
would get it under such conditions. The Japanese go still further, 
and the older boys are taken on country marches, and to the rifle 
ranges with real muskets for target practice. The result is that at 
the end of seven years the boy is ready for his real military training, 
with all the elementary work of the " goose step " at his finger tips. 
Our average American schoolboys if put through the drill and told 
to " front face " would present a head and tail arrangement, with 
the constituent elements interesting from a tailor's point of view 
as giving a wide range of the human figure but sadly at variance 
as to their goal. The curriculum of the Japanese upper schools, 
as said, is very wide. To work up to the existing standard must 
have been enormously expensive, as there was as great a lack of 
collections of scientific objects and instruments as in America there 
was lack of objects of art. In both cases the deficiency could not 
be made good by any gradual process of accretion, but only by the 
purchase of existing collections in bulk. 

" I have heard affirmed," says Herr Teufelsdrockh, " by not 
unphilanthropic persons, that it were a real increase in human 
happiness could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered 
under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible ; and there left to 
follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder 
and wiser, at the age of twenty-five." Let us leave our young 
men thus metaphorically and comfortably bestowed and pass on 
until we meet him again in the Japanese official. We leave him a 
gawky, conceited, ill-conditioned youth. We find a very different 
product at the end when we raise the barrel. The course of his 
education has been peculiar and effective. The Government has 
had its eye on him from the start. It has been weighing all his 
capabilities, and his training is directed to fitting him for that 
particular notch in the service in which he is to be placed. The 



240 SAKURAMBO 

result is a specialist. The business that comes before him he will 
do and do well, but he is chained to formula, a creature of reports. 
There is one very simple reason why the system does not go astray. 
The report — the point of view of the responsible head — is the 
basis. Facts must fit the report not vice versa. They have all 
the emphasis of dogmatic theology. There is no going behind 
them as to things human ; as to things physical — " shigata ga nai " 
— it cannot be helped. Like all men of real responsibility, the 
upper Japanese official is always pleasant to deal with in a personal 
sense. He is polite, considerate, will give the official view of the 
matter, and you will get just about as little real satisfaction out 
of him as out of a stone image. This is due to a very simple 
circumstance. He represents a government which can make no 
mistake, and the government is represented by the reports of which 
he has a little pile under his hands. It never occurs to him to 
question them and he does not understand your attitude in so 
doing. If a lost piece of baggage is directly under the eyes per- 
haps such proof of dereliction may shatter his confidence in the pile 
of slips which should record its presence. The American official, 
I think, would put more personality into his work. Naturally . 
his lading bills would also be his first resort, but there would 
also be a thorough search of all the strays to see if any of 
them corresponded physically to the inquiry sent out from 
headquarters. A Japanese official's business is confined strictly 
to his own office. If a matter does not fall under his super- 
vision he has no hint to give as to the proper place to take it. 
He is unwilling in the slightest way to involve himself in anything 
outside of his narrow line. The American official has usually a 
wider range of his subject. He is usually ready to hazard a direc- 
tion or suggestion as to the proper course. He is not afraid to 
hazard his prestige by a possible wrong direction in such an outside 
matter. He is only infallible on his own ground. The Japanese 
official on the contrary seems afraid of some possible mistake on 
his part. Outside his immediate charge he shrugs his shoulders 
and is silent, and you go out into a wilderness of offices with no 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 241 

guide but chance, for unless you happen on the right department 
the answer is always confined to " not here." Beyond that they 
will not hazard themselves. They have a large idea of them- 
selves as " officials." The idea that they are public servants never 
enters their brain. 

I have spoken of the official as being specifically the creature of 
the Government. To this alone he is bound. With the people as 
such or in their Parliament assembled he has nothing whatever to 
do. While he is an official he has no connection with them. His 
only duty is to the Government and every official, from the judge 
on the highest bench to the youngest clerk in an office, owes his 
official existence to the Government. It is worth while then to 
see what is the relation between this Government and the fifty 
millions of Japanese living and toiling under it. We usually hear 
the Revolution of 1867 spoken of as a very smooth affair, a great 
patriotic manifestation of the people, which on the face of threat- 
ened foreign invasion sanctioned a complete change in their form 
of administration and made great sacrifices. This contains just 
about as little truth as any sweeping statement could contain. As 
in' every other country every concession to the plehs, to popular 
representation, has been forced most unwillingly from the ruling 
class. The decline of the Tokugawa Shoguns, as that of their 
predecessors, was due to the inherent vices of the system. Lacking 
the necessity they lacked strong men, and the real government prac- 
tically passed into a regency just as it had done with the Minamoto 
and Ashikaga. With the exception of the last of the line, a really 
able man who accepted the position to close out the bankrupt affairs 
of the family, the later Tokugawa were polished well meaning men, 
as little qualified, as far as outward manifestation went, to sit on the 
throne as any peaceful burgher in the kingdom. Japanese writers 
usually attribute their fall to three main causes, one of which was the 
fostering of Confucian ethics which laid particular stress on the duty 
of the subject to his lord. Where there was a divided allegiance, 
naturally when discontent arose there would be a tendency to deter- 
mine toward which the allegiance was really due. As we have 

16 



242 SAKURAMBO 

seen the miserable condition of the country was ah'eady pushing' the 
Shogunate to its fall. It was reaping all the results of bad and 
selfish government. It is just at this time when the clans were 
making head at Kyoto that Admiral Perry came a second time to 
Yedo Bay with his fleet. The Shogunate was literally between 
the devil and the deep sea. They knew the helplessness of the 
country even if some of the old fossilized daimyo did not; but 
they were unable to take the drastic measures of former days. The 
calling the daimyo to council on affairs of State was an admittance 
of their right to be heard of which they had been most carefully 
stripped by the earlier Tokugawa, and finally the submission of the 
Treaties to the Emperor for sanction admitted his right to the 
supreme voice in the affairs of the country. When Prince Toku- 
gawa Keiki, however, handed over the government to the Em- 
peror he naturally had no intention of handing it over to the chiefs 
of the Satsuma and Choshu clans who, together with Tosa, con- 
stituted the backbone of the opposition to the Shogunate. It was 
too late, however, to save the situation and his adherents were too 
disorganized against this powerful and united opposition who in 
short order triumphed over their opponents and seated themselves 
in the former stronghold of their enemy — Yedo, now T5ky6. 
Even in the very hour of their triumph, however, the clans found 
themselves confronted by a new opposition in the persons of those 
who formed the progressive element and wished to organize the 
government on western lines. The opposition was in the very 
ranks of the clans themselves and in part consisted of these Liberals 
and Progressists. The situation was complicated by the presence 
of a body of reactionaries who sought to minimize the foreigniza- 
tion of the country as far as possible, retaining the old form of 
government with " Sat-cho " substituted for Tokugawa and a 
modern remodelling of the army and navy. 

In addition to the Satsuma war which this latter forced on the 
Government they were confronted by the continual agitation of the 
Progressives for the constituting of a national assembly which 
had been dimly shadowed in the Mikado's speech from the throne 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 243 

of 1868. In 1874 the Government's hand was so far forced as to 
cause the assembly of the prefects or higher officials of the prov- 
inces. The spread of western political ideas among the young 
element was making great strides all through this period (1870- 
80) and in 1881 a regular party, the Jiyu, was formed to protest 
against the Government's policy of delay and repression. In 1881 
matters came to a climax. Let me turn to a Japanese writer, Mr. 
Hitomi, to speak on the extremely practical points of politics at 
issue. " The Government of the Clans wished to sell to certain 
of its partisans some buildings belonging to the State. The whole 
nation was indignant. A thunder of objections, cries of hate and 
wrath broke out. Everywhere it was said ' this injustice is com- 
mitted because we have no chamber of deputies.' The public 
clamour reached even to the throne. The Mikado, whose heart 
beat in unison with that of his people, ordered the opening of the 
Diet for 1890 and the sale of the State property was abandoned." 
At this date the Mikado was twenty-eight years old. The clan 
leaders, however, had one great advantage in the thorough dis- 
union of their opponents who had so exhausted themselves with 
their agitations and quarrels that by 1885, Mr. Hitomi tells us, 
they were able to carry through such reforms as were necessary to 
bring the Government more into line with the western civilization 
which it was now introducing. In this year, with Ito Hirobumi as 
Minister, the question of revision of the Treaties, involving the 
right of the Japanese to regulate their own tariff and the jurisdic- 
tion of the foreign Consuls over their nationals enforcing foreign 
laws on Japanese soil, started a new storm. On both these sub- 
jects the. Japanese were extremely sensitive. The presence of 
foreign judges was to them an insult to the national good faith and 
their own tribunals; the revision of the tariff was absolutely 
necessary to enable the country to meet the expense of the new 
regime. What the nation dreaded was concessions to the foreign- 
ers on these vital points, and on these points they were determined 
to have all or none. The whole country was in an uproar. The 
Government now tried repressive measures. There were riots. 



244 SAKURAMBO 

armed collision and bloodshed. The leaders of the opposition were 
imprisoned or banished from the Capital. Every right of petition 
was refused, and the Council was protected from outside pressure. 
Even the strongest men hardly dare face a nation in wrath, and at 
last in 1890 a Diet was convoked, selected on very limited grounds 
of suffrage. Practically the greater part of it was appointed and 
the veto power on its proceedings was carefully left in the hands 
of the Government. 

In outward appearance the Japanese Constitution in its inde- 
pendence of executive and legislative has some resemblance to the 
American Constitution. The resemblance, however, is entirely 
superficial, and they are based on very different grounds. When 
the leaders of the clans were forced finally into calling a Diet, the 
object was to render that body just as helpless as possible, to strip 
it of all real power, while at the same time to be able to " report 
progress " to the nation at large and keep the governing power 
in their own hands, to maintain in fact, if not appearance, the old 
government by a council of leaders and heads of departments. 
Under the Constitution the Diet must meet every year, but that 
provision was nullified by the power of proroguing it or dis- 
solving it, vested in the Throne at will. The sanctioning of the 
Budget was granted to the Diet, but this important power was 
nullified by giving t\ie Government the right to use the Budget of 
the preceding year in case of failure to pass the new Budget. If 
a minister got through a favourable Budget, by this and the power 
of proroguing and dissolving the Diet, he could still carry on the 
government, although new legislation was to some extent blocked. 
Even this could be provided for by Imperial Ordinance, good law 
until there was opportunity to submit such ordinance for the 
approval of the Diet. The inviolability of the members of the 
Diet was not left untrammelled. As Mr. Collier points out in his 
" Institutions Politiques du Japon," the clause " except in case 
of flagrant crime or an offence connected with disorder internal 
or external " admits of a wide interpretation and practically covers 
political offences. The membership of the Diet was also given 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 245 

due consideration. The regulations fixing the electorate were 
most carefully drawn to exclude all the commercial and industrial 
interests of the country, and an electorate based practically on tax 
paid on land limited still further the power of national expression. 
At that date the city of Tokyo, with a population of a million 
and a cjuarter, had less than three thousand qualified voters. 
Stripped of all offensive power, the Japanese Diet was, and is, the 
merest farce of a representative body. The Ministers remained 
responsible to the throne only, the Diet merely being a convenient 
form of ascertaining the opinions of certain interests in the land. 
No legislative body is going to submit to such a condition and 
war was on from the start. Every government proposition was 
thrown out. This was met by defiance on the part of the clan 
leaders. In 1892 the election was accompanied by riot and blood- 
shed due, it was charged, to the interference of the Government in 
their efforts to return their nominees. Diet after Diet only met 
to be prorogued. One Diet is said to have lasted thirty seconds. 
Only foreign war has mitigated this condition of affairs, during 
which periods the nation of course presented a united front. Men 
who live under a representative government can sympathize with 
this struggle of the Japanese Diet; to force responsibility to the 
Japanese people on their irresponsible ministers; to take out of 
the hands of a little group of men the governing power and vest it 
where it really belongs, in the hands of the people through their 
freely chosen representatives. They have not gained much as 
yet. A wider extension of the electorate making it somewhat 
more representative is about all there is to show for fifteen years 
of struggle. The propert}^ qualification has been lowered to a 
payment of national tax amounting to ten yen yearly. This is the 
wages of a coolie for a month. To pay income tax to that amount 
would, in the peace time, have meant an income of two thousand 
yen a year. It will be interesting to see what effect the expanding 
industrialism is going to have on this question. Under modern 
conditions this must have means of making itself heard, and its 
prosperity is too much bound up in the prosperity of the people at 



246 SAKURAMBO 

large not to make themselves heard. Industrialism will make itself 
felt not only on the side of the great interests, but the guilds, those 
ancient representatives of the Japanese plehs will demand a voice 
in the national assembly. It is at some such point that the Jap- 
anese people are going" to enter on their heritage of government. 
When the people make up their minds to that change the present 
bureaucracy are going to have just as little power of resistance 
as the old feudal system. No question enters here of loyalty to the 
reigning sovereign. They are enshrined in the hearts of the 
Japanese people, inviolable, deep-rooted in the religious sentiment 
of the race. But this feeling of loyalty does not extend to the 
ministers. " The king reigns but does not govern," and the Jap- 
anese hold the ministers strictly responsible for all the acts ot 
government. This can now only find its expression in protest, 
even at times in assassination. 

The Government, fortunately, are taking what to an outsider 
seems the very best means to ride to their own downfall and a 
change in the present system. They have undertaken the educa- 
tion of the land and in every school their ideal of loyalty Is taught. 
The speeches of visiting officials to the schools, the formalities, the 
general throwing up of hats whenever the Government is men- 
tioned, reminds one of similar scenes in the England of the early 
nineteenth century wjien the muttering and rumbling was already 
heard of those revolutionary bodies advocating the Repeal of 
the Corn Laws and the Reform Bill. But they are also teaching 
reading, writing, and arithmetic in these Japanese schools. News- 
papers are widespread and political interest very great. One is 
impressed by this as he wanders over the Empire, from city to 
country town and merest hamlet. The Japanese swallows his 
newspaper statements on general subjects rather credulously, but 
he takes his politics intelligently and knows what he wants. Of 
course to a foreigner, especially American, they sometimes have 
an inverted way of looking at things that might be more familiar 
to a German or other Continental European, who is willing to put 
up with much for unity's sake in face of pressing danger on all 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 247 

sides of him. The Japanese, however, is differently situated. He 
has no such pressing dangers. His position is very much isolated 
from all effective interference in his home affairs. His one real 
enemy has never been able to get near enough to effectively threaten 
him. A possible enemy — a great sluggish hulk — will first have 
to shake off the habits and enervation of centuries before it presents 
any points of danger. ■ Even at this early date there are many 
protests raised against the Bismarckian policy of the governing 
powers. The old excuse is of course made that the people are not 
educated for a fuller system of representation. In the eyes of 
rulers monopolising the government the people never are, and yet 
they have managed very well elsewhere. There are some pretty 
wild scenes enacted at times in the American Congress, in the 
British Parliament, and in the French Chamber of Deputies, but it 
would be hard to point to a single occasion where the national 
assembly has gone wrong. In America we have had a manhood 
suffrage from the time of the nation's birth. Whatever has gone 
wrong has been due to idleness and neglect on the part of the 
people and not to inherent rottenness, and the remedy has lain in 
their own hands and it has been used unsparingly. A nation wants 
none of a bureaucracy whose ''esprit de corps " will protect its 
members simply in self-preservation. And, incidentally, a nation 
is much less likely to weaken before a cleaning of the Augean 
stables. When the great national crisis came in 1861 in the 
United States it was the people who defeated compromise on the 
question, and it was the people in the North who, in face of discour- 
agement and sacrifices, fought the war through. A bureaucracy 
would have sought and easily found such compromise in 1862. 
The large body of the Japanese people give the stranger the impres- 
sion that they are just as well fitted as any other people to look 
after their national interests ; and the Japanese Diet, given respon- 
sibility, would be no more likely to run amuck than any other 
national assembly. Where no responsibility attaches there always 
is more or less wild talk, as much to get the other fellow " in a 
hole " as anything else. The clansmen tried it in the 6o's when 



248 SAKURAMBO 

they were egging on the agitation against the Shogunate. not 
because the leaders really believed in expulsion of the foreigners, 
for once in power they made a square volte face. The wild talk 
in the Diet would end, as it ends everywhere else, in the com- 
mittee room. As their Government distrusts them, so the Jap- 
anese apparently distrust their Government in the expression of 
the national wishes. They did not trust them in the Revision 
of the Treaties, or in the treaty made after the China war ; and the 
anything but dignified discussion over the Russian treaty would 
have been obviated, if the people felt that it must come before their 
representatives who are responsible to them for the way in which 
they guard the national interests. 

This combination of western individualistic training on the 
unindividualistic Japanese — a training that to-day is distinctly 
anti-communistic — has produced a unique result. The most nar- 
row-minded man in the world has placed in his hands that most 
beautiful weapon of modern thought, the Inductive Logic, painfully 
polished by years of trial and mistakes, and which is the basis on 
which our whole modern structure scientific and social rests, and 
the method on which it depends for its future progress. For the 
inductive reasoning has the advantage that its ultimate basis must 
rest on fact, and the facts lying at the basis of a law of Nature so 
determined must ha^ie a very wide range, as wide as Nature 
herself. Where the law does not conform to all the facts it gives 
way, to go to that lumber pile of human effort which has in these 
latter days reached such monumental proportions. To use such a 
process requires such a separation of self that the only factors 
of error left are those physical properties of sense perceptions by 
which we have to detect and measure the phenomena under exam- 
ination, and this as far as possible is eliminated b}^ widening the 
field of observation and the number of observers. Many are 
called and few chosen in this field. Many are the theories elab- 
orated to help the onward march of science, to enable us to co- 
ordinate phenomena and look at them under a different viewpoint. 
Many are the theories so rejected but many of them have had 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 249 

most fruitful results. No one seriously believes in the atom and the 
molecule of our chemical philosophy as anything but a convenient 
mental picture which enables us to grasp new relations among 
the elements. Most fruitful it has been and is now, as is shown 
by the co-ordination of such widely separated forms of matter as 
solid liquid and gas, enabling us to express in a common mathe- 
matical formula widely separated and yet related phenomena. 
Never has science stood such a test as to the real soundness of its 
groundwork as in the past few years. We simply read ionization 
into our chemical formula, and substitute Thompson's " cor- 
puscles " for the atom. The mental picture of the atom is not 
affected. It still remains the last factor which our balances and 
measuring tubes are able to take into account. We have simply 
obtained further insight into that mysterious body called indefin- 
itely for so many years the luminiferous ether. Deductive Logic 
can never reach this point. It is always and must always be a 
thing of the brain. Indeed, were it not for our unconscious induc- 
tive habits of thought in these modern days, it would be as mis- 
leading to-day as it has been in the past. It is far more dangerous 
than useful. For the human mind rarely forms a complete picture 
and hence when we start out to prove a law deductively we are 
likely to miss details fatal to the theory but passed over as non- 
essential or even unrelated. The field of the mind is far too 
limited compared to any range of natural phenomena, and it is 
only later — perhaps after much mischief has been done and the 
whole pack has been led far astray — that the real range of the 
subject is detected and with it incongruities in the law. Inductive 
Logic taking in all the relations of an object to other objects, after 
comparing and collating- these relations, avoids this danger. 

Now the easterner, the Japanese, is essentially deductive in his 
habits of thought. Facts have been the last thing to bother him 
and he has been spinning the world out of his inner consciousness. 
Such consciousness it is hardly necessary to say is a very national 
consciousness, and the result of it has been a universe of which 
he himself has been the hub; what in politeness we will call an 



^50 SAKURAMBO 

ultra development of " patriotism " but which really savours more 
of blind prejudice. It is hardly to be expected that they can break 
away from it in a few generations, but, as it is, we have the strange 
sight of a man with about as badly a warped judgment as living 
at the bottom of a well for centuries can give him, and at the 
same time as to acquired knowledge inside the range of this 
inrooted idea of himself as the centre, armed with all the resources 
of modern western thought. In everything that touches material 
progress he is wide enough awake. He can see the advantage of a 
battleship or of a sewing machine, for these are points that are to 
be adjusted to his self-centred system, not have been so adjusted. 
Doubtless in time this will be so thoroughly done that we will hear 
that both these products of human ingenuity originated about the 
end of May, 1905, just as we learn nowadays that the jinricksha 
was of native invention. But the frieze of the Parthenon or the 
Venus de Milo is no more to him than a sawdust doll. All classed 
under the generic Ningyo. Raphael, Titian, Murillo, Rembrandt, 
or Van Dyke, fall into line with the illustrations of the news- 
paper. As for western thought, it has all been thought before 
(in China), and he swallows the posthumous dates of the Chinese 
commentaries without winking, although you would find him wise 
in all the higher criticism as to the origin of the Homeric legends. 
The Drama, a mass^of incongruities and impossibilities sprinkled 
with a few beautiful passages, are vastly to be preferred to the 
beautiful lines of the Antigone or the CEdipus Coloneus, or the 
passion of the Hecuba or the Medea, and of course Shakespeare 
went to school to a Chinaman and concealed the fact. You hear 
much of the agnosticism that is widespread among the Japanese 
upper classes which is perfectly true as to all matters applicable 
to Things not Japanese, but not to the reverse. You can run over 
a considerable gamut of subjects with Japanese, not only educated 
and able talkers on their own ground, but with full experience of 
other lands. Everything from the scepticism of Hume to the posi- 
tivism of Comte, from the cold-blooded critical method of Gibbon 
in history to the ecjually cold-blooded deductions of Malthus in 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 251 

economics, meet with their high approval. The higher criticism 
as a method apphecl to the study of western rehgions is an instru- 
ment of greatest use. In the next breath the same man will assure 
you that he regards the fables of the Kojiki as sane histoiy, and that 
he thoroughly believes the origin of his nation to start from the 
descent of the gods into Kyushu. When the leaders of the vic- 
torious troops attributed their success to the divine virtue of their 
Emperor and the approval of the spirits of the Imperial Line, they 
were not talking for effect. *' By the grace of God " may have 
some meaning to the crowned head that uses it in Europe, but to 
the upper classes of Europe it is the thinnest pretence of a formula, 
the rallying cry of their class against democracy. We know that 
in our secret souls, individuals or nations, we all have a very 
considerable opinion of ourselves. It is a very poor man and a 
very poor nation that has not this healthy egoistic impression. 
Bill Smith criticises Bill Shakespeare, and what is more. Bill Smith 
goes to the gallery and gives his opinion just as vigorously and 
just. as confidently as Bill Jones the critic does the next day in the 
theatrical column of the newspaper. Whatever he has of this 
spirit of self-conceit is reinforced in the Japanese by his habit of 
thought, that habit which makes the community the centre of inter- 
est and the centre of his world. A man might distrust himself as 
individual, but not as body politic. In the West, isolated in our 
individualism, the more we know the more timid we grow. Pesr 
simism is a true child of the modern West. We are growing more 
suggestive in our thinking than positive in our action. The 
reverse is the case in Japan, for they are filling, not the illimitable 
space with their acquired knowledge but a very finite section of it. 
Their system of deductive generalization makes them admirable 
government servants. The Government lays down the ground 
plan, fills in the minutiae, and puts each man in his place. It is a 
system built of carefully selected material, not a system to cover 
all material. Just at present the machine is new. So was the 
Tokugawa machine in its day. Government by the Diet will at 
least drive a wedge into the clan system. Widening of the elec- 



252 SAKURAMBO 

torate will throw hereditary prestige: still further into the back- 
ground, and everything that so acts strikes for individualism and 
means a wider range of universe for man and nation. 

What then is the relation of the foreigner to the man trained 
in this nationally egoistic school with its extremely limited out- 
look. The usual and most important point of contact is with the 
civil and criminal code of the land as administered in its Courts. 
Previous to the revision of the treaties Japan adopted a code mainly 
based on the French and German codes, due regard being paid 
to modifying in such a way as to provide for national habits, polit- 
ical and social, with special reference to their own family system. 
Previous to the adoption of this code, the law of the land while 
to some extent codified, was based on local custom and was pretty 
much a " law of the Cadi," so to speak. The Judiciary, therefore, 
had to be trained in entirely new habits of thought and of method, 
and from the criticisms made the result has been much what was to 
be expected — a rigid adherence to the letter of the law with a good 
deal of timidity in applying its spirit. If a purely Japanese code 
had been built from the ground up — and it was more the spirit 
of its application than a lack of basic moral and legal material that 
needed change — it is fair to presume that great jurists thoroughly 
imbued with the spirit of such a code would have risen up in the 
land. There seems, jjjowever, a general consensus of foreign opin- 
ion that no Lord Mansfield or John Marshall has as yet arisen to 
infuse spirit into the dry bones of the present borrowed code. 
Foreigners and natives avoid as far as possible all appeal to its 
tedious processes as the very shadow of the Evil One, and for the 
amount of business done there is perhaps a larger resort to arbi- 
tration in Yokohama than any other place of its size, and that in 
despite of the excellent reputation of the local Bench. There is 
nothing extraordinary in this. As in Pickwick's case, " people 
who go to law or are dragged into it are naturally nervous over 
the outcome," and in these latter days the resort to it enjoys any- 
thing but good odour as a means of settling disputes ; the best of 
lawyers avowedly trying to keep their clients out of court, and not 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 253 

get them into it. In the land cases reported from time to time, 
action is confessedly very conservative and leans to side of the 
native or original holder. This, too, is no peculiarity of the 
Japanese Bench. The transfer of land is very much a matter of 
formalities, and in their strict observance depends the legality 
of such transfer. In Japan as elsewhere the strictest regard is paid 
to the reg'ularity of such transfer, but the peculiar position of the 
foreigner in reference to land lays many traps for his feet. He 
cannot own land, he can only lease the land with the right to erect 
buildings on it. Some of these leases amount practically to a sale 
of the land being for very long terms of years, but it is always 
necessary to get the consent of all the parties having a contingent 
interest, and in the complicated family system of the Japanese this 
is by no means always a simple matter. The Japanese as yet seem 
to have no such system as Title Insurance, great central plants 
covering pretty much the whole system of the real estate of a 
district, and which at small cost enable a purchaser through one of 
the Title Insurance companies to judge at a glance just what he 
is buying. Their system is much as it is in our small towns and 
some country districts, where search must be made in the records 
of several county offices to get all the necessary data as to previous 
transfer, mortgages, and other encumbrances. Another compli- 
cation lies in leases made outside the settlements, many of them 
in Japanese names. Duly registered at the Consulates, these leases 
were held to be legally correct as to the rights so transferred. 
On the lapse of the consular jurisdiction, registration of these 
virtual transfers was required to make the title hold good. This 
undoubtedly was a retroactive law to which the Anglo-Saxon 
anyhow is unfamiliar, and would rest blissfully ignorant that their 
previous title had been vitiated by its passage. This, with 
absenteeism on the part of foreigners who have gone home still 
retaining their Japanese investments, has been taken advantage of 
by speculators, not to be called by any harsher names, however, 
than the large and flourishing band of kindred gentry in our West. 
The original idea of the Japanese regulations seems to have been 



254 SAKURAMBO 

t6 prevent foreigners in any way getting control over land outside 
of certain fixed districts. These long leases on outside land, and in 
the names of a native, were of course a subterfuge and an evasion 
of the law. The Government, however, winked at it and tacitly 
admitted its legality through the Consular registration. The 
Courts have acted very fairly if strictly in most of these cases, 
and where judgment has gone by default have reopened the cases 
on presentation of good reason for a rehearing. 

A foreigner naturally stands at no little disadvantage through 
ignorance of language and customs. In an American Court 'the 
interests of a foreigner are most carefully protected with view of 
his special disadvantages, and American juries have the reputation 
of equally taking these disadvantages into consideration in the 
jury box. The Japanese have the French system. The trial 
is purely judicial, the Judge hearing the evidence, conducting the 
examination, and deciding on law and fact. To us, to look at a 
question purely from the legal point of view, is only looking at 
one side of it. The Judge cannot help his special training biasing 
his more general point of view simply as to the facts. Everything 
is examined through glasses of a single tint. In Japanese criminal 
cases it is a question whether proper weight is given to evidence 
of foreigners in a business community where the standard is neces- 
sarily high. The difficulty has more than once arisen in assault 
cases between European and native. The low class Japanese is 
very truculent. It can easily be noticed how, when a European 
accidentally brushes against them on the street, they stop and look 
back after him. In more aggravated cases they will pursue him, 
start an altercation, in which they are enthusiastically backed up 
by every idler and ricksha rough in the vicinity. Such episodes 
rarely go to personal assault among the Japanese, but a foreigner 
does not know that, and takes the will for the deed, as he would 
do at home, and vigorously defends himself, especially as he sees 
scores of natives jostling against each other without paying the 
least attention to such an episode. The westerner therefore may 
find himself in court as defendant with the triumphant coolie 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 255 

as prosecutor, when he had only under his usages acted in most 
justifiable self-defence. And his evidence is severely scrutinized. 
Now the westerner is essentially truthful, and can claim more than 
equal credit with the native among whom the national habit of 
adorning a tale is rather widespread. There is not only the re- 
ligious sanction of the oath in his case but there is a legal sanction 
which is far more important. Perjury is an uncommon occurrence 
in a western courtroom, which we will not claim as due to any 
moral superiority in the race but to the fact that the westerner is 
a clearer reasoner than the man of the East. He can see the hole 
in a well-fitted tale very quickly, and where the moral obligation 
to tell the truth does not exist long experience will teach him that 
" honesty is the best policy."' In assault cases it is felt that unless 
the foreigner is fortunate enough to have native evidence on his 
side it will go hardly with him, for his western evidence will be 
badly discounted. And he need not rely on native evidence. 
There is none of that spirit of fair play which is a part of our 
Anglo-Saxon inheritance and which makes our jury system possi- 
ble. This has never had a chance to develop among the Japanese. 
Their old clan system is responsible for this, stripping the individ- 
ual of all responsibility and putting it on the shoulders of the 
clan. They have none of this feeling of fair play toward each 
other. Why should it be shown in the case of the foreigner? 
Take the weight of the evidence, and the avoirdupois of a host 
of coolies will outweigh two or three foreigners without much 
reference to the probabilities. There is no doubt that every effort 
is made to be fair and just, but it is the system that is at fault, 
and some of the printed decisions seem attempts to justify the 
decision reached rather than expositions of the legal principles 
involved. If they were acting to-day on a code based on their own 
national customs and legal habits of thought there is no reason to 
doubt that great legal minds would have made their influence felt on 
the Japanese code, but they are acting under a system totally 
foreign to their habits of thought ; which does not mean of course 
that eastern judges cannot apply western law but that they can 



256 SAKURAMBO 

hardly be expected to be enthusiastic over such appHcation. At 
all events a remark made by Professor Dowden, perhaps, also finds 
application-. Speaking of the French Judiciary under the absolut- 
ism of Louis XIV., he says : " Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth 
and elevation which come with political freedom ; it contented itself 
with subtleties of argument decked with artificial flowers of style." 
Of the relations between foreigners and native" merchants it 
is hardly necessary to speak, for the Japanese commercial standard 
is so universally a subject of complaint that where there is so much 
smoke there is bound to be fire. This is the more extraordinary 
in that among themselves they have always made use of an exten- 
sive credit system. The better class among Japanese merchants 
entered very reluctantly into the foreign trade, and even to-day 
they do not seem to have the control and disciplining of their more 
slippery fellow-merchants that they have in other countries. How 
the Japanese ever expect to replace the great foreign houses in the 
treaty ports is difficult to imagine. Until a very different standard 
is adopted, and a guild is ready to punish not to uphold delinquent 
members, foreigners will want to have their representatives on the 
ground. A limiting of the right of appeal and a strict construction 
of contracts in the courts would aid this only to some extent. The 
power of the guilds to boycott merchants who have successfully 
maintained their rights in the local courts can only be broken 
down by the action of the Japanese Government itself. One hears 
much of such boycotts as an ordinary weapon of the guilds in 
Japanese commercial life. The only other contact which the 
foreigner is likely to have with the native is with the official. The 
higher Japanese official has been mentioned. From the head of 
the office and the older men one could ask no better treatment. 
They avowedly do their best. With the young element, the sub- 
clerk, the sense of importance as a government clerk is too new to sit 
easily. He is lackadaisical and to all appearances he is lazy. From 
such appearance one would say the Government offices are greatly 
overmanned, and cigarette smoking occupies about as much time as 
making entries in the ledgers. I much prefer the young American. 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 257 

He may be brusque — which is largely clue to our idea of the value of 
time. He brings matters to a point at once, as if his time too was 
enormously valuable, but he interests himself to put your business 
through. Frankly, to get rid of it and you ; and the greater despatch 
the greatest recommendation to his employers. If he is a government 
clerk there are always a host with an eye to his place, and it pays him 
to show energy. He has to sit hard on his job to hold it. The Jap- 
anese official, it can be said, is raised above any attacks. He is 
inviolable and unapproachable. The same cannot be said of public 
men unconnected with Government. If one can judge by the license 
of the public press — which emphatically one cannot — we should, at 
times, have to apply what Gil Bias says of his friend the licentiate 
of Salamanca. He would be a very nice person were it not for 
three trifling foibles, " litigation, fornication, and intoxication." 

There is a good deal of " squealing " among foreigners. 
Disputes with coolies, extortion at hotels, late trains, call down 
an amount of denunciation or the pitying shrug of the shoulders, 
as if such things were only experienced in travelling in Japan. 
In those respects they are at least as well ofif as at home. And as 
to safety, Tokyo is a far safer city at night than New York, Lon- 
don, or Paris. The criminal element is not so much in evidence as 
in those great cities. But there is one marked impression in 
taking a wide range of travel through the country, and that is that 
the anti-foreign feeling is still strong in Japan. They appreciate 
the advantages of western material civilization and still retain their 
dislike of the contact necessary to reap all the advantages of that 
civilization. It is the material civilization they want, not the broad 
international life and exchange of ideas that in our own intense 
western nationalism still finds expression in the term " family 
of nations." Even the limited and harmless contact with the 
foreigner is still a source of irritation to old Japan, and an im- 
mense amount of the old Japan still exists and is instilled into 
young Japan. Now this is not simply a dislike of the foreigner as 
such. We all know the saying, " Bill, there goes a stranger." 
" Well ! "eave 'arf a brick at him." This is a feeling found all over 
17 



258 SAKURAMBO 

the world, but it is not racial. The Japanese feeling is strictly- 
racial. They have it toward the westerner, very little toward the 
Chinaman, and it only needs some trivial dispute to have the 
barriers broken down and an open expression of dislike to the Jin^ 
Easterners are usually specified. Nankin no hito, nippon no hito^ 
indo no hito, or Chinaman, Japanese, Indian. Europe is simply — 
the rest, man or Jin. When the Chinaman falls into bad odour he 
too becomes Jin. 

As I had entered Takeda by one tunnel so I left it by another, 
which again brought me into the outside world. The day's jour- 
ney took me over the central plateau which occupies the centre of 
this northern end of the island. We were not long among the 
pretty wooded scenery, but were soon gradually ascending and 
winding among low desolate hills covered with bamboo grass. 
The general contour reminded me somewhat of the country south 
of Waiotapu in the North Island of New Zealand or of the coast 
hills in the neighbourhood of San Diego in southern California. 
Except for the bamboo grass. The Japanese owes much, very 
much, to the bamboo, but he could well dispense with this degen- 
erate form of it. One sees thousands of acres of land in the 
country which elsewhere would be covered with grazing cattle. 
But this grass is poison to them and with sheep the expression 
'' rotgut " is inelegant but accurate. Charles Dudley Warner, in 
that excellent guide for the agricultural neophyte, " My Summer 
in a Garden," tells us that the American pusley has more original 
sin than any other weed extant. If, however, Russian thistle, 
Canadian dock, San Jose scale, and even pusley can be success- 
fully dealt with, why not bamboo grass? It certainly looks as if 
the attempt to clothe these hillsides with foreign grass, to substi- 
tute clover and timothy for the present rank article, would be a 
profitable investment. At the head of a pretty ravine I left my 
ricksha for the men to carry down the slope as best they could for 
the road was atrociously bad. At the bottom we came out on a 
wide beautifully cultivated plain, the floor of the great outside 
crater of Asosan. There are but few breaks in the precipitous 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 259 

sides, one of them being at the point by which I had entered. In 
the south end rises the present and active cone, itself a great moun- 
tain mass. In speaking of the isolation of the valley at Waka- 
matsu I mentioned one other instance in Japan. It is here on the 
crater floor of Asosan. A score of villages are hard at work with 
every hint, physically speaking, cut ofT of an outside world. One 
understands now the slow climb over the broad plateau. Asosan 
is the greatest crater in the world with the whole of the north of 
KyushCi as its base. Greater than Halemaumau that vast pile that 
rises in Maui. In remote ages when the inhabitants of some other 
planet turn their telescopes on Terra and her satellite, Asosan will 
be one of the few of our volcanic landmarks to command a feeble 
comparison, unless old earth's exit as a scene of life is to be marked 
again by some such scenes of fire as she has already passed 
through. 

And these peasants, seen working in every direction through 
their fields ; what manner of people are they ? I think that nearly 
everyone that comes in contact with the individual Japanese peas- 
ant likes him. The genuine countryman is by no means to be 
confounded with the town coolie. One could get nowhere a finer 
courtesy than is often experienced when stopping to rest or to 
exchange exceeding-ly bad Japanese with the occupants of many 
of these isolated thatched houses, almost huts we would call them. 
Information as to route, shelter from the weather, are extended 
in a dignified and kindly manner and the average Ojisan would be 
hard to match in his class in any part of the world. These country 
people have all the qualities of the race. They are brave, polite, 
prejudiced, and pigheaded, with their world limited pretty much 
to the range of their physical sense of sight. They are a very 
important subject in relation to other nations, for it is the Jap- 
anese peasant that forms the bulk of the flood of emigration to 
other lands, and where he is far from popular, whether it be in 
Korea or the United States, in Canada or in Australia. Part of 
this is due to his clannishness. The greater number enter the 
United States to form part of their communities, not to enter into 



260 SAKURAMBO 

the general life of the people. And these communities are very 
aggressive. They regard themselves and act as a little section 
of Japan, a nation apart from their immediate surroundings, to be 
ruled and governed with small regard to the customs or the preju- 
dices of their neighbours. They have shown at times small dis- 
position to resort to the Courts or to peaceful measures, and these 
communities often carry things with a high hand. Armed colli- 
sions have more than once required the interference of the authori- 
ties in the United States, in Canada, and in Hawaii. The native 
does not view with any particular liking the collisions between 
native labour unions and employers, so likely to occur during 
a prolonged strike, and when the foreigner chooses to make the 
country the scene of such private war, he very naturally looks still 
more closely into their desirability as political and social bedfel- 
lows. It is hardly to be doubted what action the Japanese Gov- 
ernment would take if foreigners made its inland waters a battle- 
ground, or would start a riot in the streets of Yokohama or Kobe. 
But the fact that many people — particularly in the western United 
States — have come to look on the Japanese especially as tricky and 
quarrelsome, and likely to give trouble in the land, has but little 
influence on the real question raised by such immigration, particu- 
larly in the United States and in the British Colonies. Every 
government is bound to look out for the interests of its working- 
classes, especially that class whose earnings bring them pretty 
close to the standard set by the public opinion of the community 
as the irreducible minimum. In the United States and in Canada 
we have a very high standard. It is safe to say that the average 
American labourer eats meat once a day. It is our aim to raise 
that standard not to lower it. Now the white man can live as 
the yellow man does, but in the United States we do not intend to 
allow that undesirable condition to materialize. In some countries 
of Europe — Italy and Spain — and even in some parts of France 
and Germany, meat is never seen by the peasant classes, and in 
Italy the average daily expense of feeding the peasant would 
come unfavourably near to that of China and Japan. We do not 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 261 

want to accustom our people to any such living. If our labouring 
classes are brought into free competition with the Asiatic, that is 
sure to be the result. A horde of these people entering into the 
countr)^ could quickly drive American labour to the wall, and with 
the advantage of position could wait their turn to be ousted. It 
would be a peaceful conquest of the land in which the conquered 
placed in the hands of the conqueror the very weapon to which 
they would owe their defeat — their own high standard. The 
East is not confronted with this question at all. Their standard 
is very low and their labouring class ensured against competition. 
Their contact with the western world is merely through those 
agents necessary in our modern commercial system of barter and 
exchange, and it is not much to their credit that their spirit of 
exclusion has been dictated by race prejudice. There is not much 
doubt as to how the Japanese Government would solve this ques- 
tion, if a hundred thousand coolies from China were dumped into 
the former Kwanto to compete with their ricksha men, their farm 
labourers, their carpenters, masons, and many minor trades. 
Without reference to the diplomatic casuistry that the translation 
of the French term metier can give rise to we have some inkling as 
to how the Japanese regard this question themselves. An Im- 
perial Ordinance as to subjects and citizens of non-treaty powers, 
after granting to foreigners the right to reside where they please, 
engage in trade and business, says " it shall not be lawful for 
labourers to reside or carry on their business outside the places 
hitherto used as foreign settlements or zones of mixed residence, 
unless they obtain special permission " and further on it defines 
the term labourer. " By the term ' labourers ' shall be understood 
persons engaged in agriculture, fishing, mining, engineering, build- 
ing, manufacturing, transportation, jinricksha drawing, porterage, 
and other kinds of physical toil for gain." This last clause is a 
truly Catholic provision for eventualities or errors of omission. 
The method of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 
United States has given rise to much just complaint, but the 
Chinese are largely responsible for it themselves. A Chinese cer- 



262 SAKURAMBO 

tificate of the occupation of the holder is worth just about the 
paper it is written on and no more, and for this only their own 
local authorities are to blame. We do not pretend in the United 
States to settle the disputes among the Chinese themselves. They 
rarely call on us to do so. They are a community apart, and the 
imported Chinaman who went back on his contract would not live 
very long to enjoy the fruits of his cunning. China is not the 
only country with which the United States has disputes on this 
question. The legislation to keep out paupers, criminals, and 
diseased, meets with every possible opposition in official circles, 
and in Europe agents of the Immigration Bureau meet with any- 
thing but a cordial welcome. Experience has shown us that the 
European peoples assimilate and form part of ourselves. Even 
with them in some cases the rules are so strict as to amount to 
exclusion of whole classes. It is to be noted that the Chinese Ex- 
clusion Act was passed after due trial and warning of the con- 
tinued danger of such immigration. Three hundred years ago 
it M'as the aim of the great Henry of Bourbon that every French- 
man should be able to have his chicken in the pot. Our standard 
in the United States has been pushed still higher, and most of the 
other countries still open to settlement have followed the example. 
China moreover is the last country in the world to raise ques- 
tions of exclusion, \'\4lien we come to consider her treaty ports with 
their circurhscribed limits for the activity of foreigners, and the 
necessity for elaborate preparations and due notice to the authori- 
ties if travel in the interior of that happy land is to be undertaken. 
Besides, she sells twice where she buys once, and is not likely to 
quarrel with the United States over the exclusion of the coolies. 
The broad hand of " Uncle Sam " has had no little to do with 
smothering those whispers of " spheres of influence " so often 
heard a few years ago. The Japanese Government now controls 
very strictly the emigration of its coolie class. - There were prob- 
ably reasons of high politics that sent thousands of coolies to 
Hawaii, to the United States, to Mexico and Peru, and everywhere 
but to northeastern Asia. One hears much nowadays of the " yel- 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 263 

low peril," a subject well worthy of attention though not immedi- 
ately threatening. There is a " yellow peril " but not until the 
three hundred millions of Chinese wake up and conclude to but- 
tress their economic efficiency with physical force, with armies 
and navies trained in western schools. There will probably never 
be another Attila or Genghis Khan. In science too many men 
are everywhere closely following the same lines of investigation 
as to make an isolated discovery of world-wide importance akin to 
and of the revolutionary nature of that of gunpowder. Great 
•discoveries are always foreshadowed in these times. In former 
<lays the world's business was mainly fighting, now it is mainly 
w^orking. The struggle between East and West will be based on 
•economic grounds which, however, may seek an issue by resort to 
arms. It will be a war for the world's markets rather than a 
•struggle of nations seeking an outlet for their superfluous popu- 
lation. How far the Japanese will dare to arm their big neighbour 
remains to be seen. An armed, independent, and centralized 
China would mean short shrift to the present position of Japan in 
northern Asia. It is to be suspected that much more would the 
sound of " spheres of influence " tickle their ears, and the develop- 
ment of Japan as a great continental power is the only point at 
w^hich she is to be feared. That is quite possible, although whether 
it is to be regarded as a yellow peril is open to some question. 
Never did a brave and ambitious people so completely lack natural 
resources to carry out their dream of supremacy. Japan is poor in 
that very thing that makes nations great in these latter days. She 
has no iron. Thirty thousand tons form her quota to the world's 
production in a year, and her geology does not favour the idea 
that her condition will be found, on further investigation, to be 
materially bettered in this respect. She must depend on other 
■countries to feed her furnaces. A footing in northeastern Asia 
would change this and would put in her hands the great deposits 
of northern China which contain, as far as known, some of the 
finest Bessemer ore in the world. The stakes played for in north- 
-eastern Asia are well worth the winning, and the victor well worth 



264 SAKURAMBO 

the watching. When the battle between West and East does come 
it will be a merciless one, for it will be a contest between civiliza- 
tions radically different in their bases ; between which there can be 
substitution not compromise, and in which the conquered, im- 
mersed in a medium foreign to his nature will die of of inanition. 
A cold-blooded clash such as Mr. Wells has drawn for us in his 
" War of the Worlds " — the Martians and the World People. 
The great Napoleon prophesied the division of the world between 
Slav and Republic and time can well be given to see how the pre- 
diction works out, although Slav by no means excludes the idea 
of Republic. A third formidable factor has risen — Mongol. Slav 
and Mongol, not Slav and Anglo-Saxon, have clashed first, and 
the rest of the world can look on with indifference. The Slav 
has been checked in this first contest, as much by conditions as by 
his own fault, and Anglo- Saxondom at all events cannot grumble 
at the outcome, provided that Mongol balances Slav and is not sub- 
stituted for him. That great people of eastern Europe have not 
been waked up as yet, and under their present regime cannot be. 
In mass they much resemble China, but with a fierce national 
feeling not found among the Chinese. One cannot help admiring 
that intensity which in Austria and the Balkan provinces forbids 
any compromise with other races, but obstinately looks forward 
to the domination of the Slav race. Disagreeable as such an out- 
come would be the supremacy of Slav is to be preferred to that of 
Mongol. We know something about his qualifications and can 
judge something as to the result. His Tolstoi and his Turgenieff 
appeal to us as do our own writers. In science and art and relig- 
ion he has at least one foot in Europe. It is the bureaucracy of 
Russia that is dreaded — that hideous and cruel incubus that crushes 
out all breath of liberty and gives rise to such nightmares as 
nihilism and anarchy — ^but the bureaucracy in Russia is not neces- 
sarily an institution of a people who have a genius much to be 
admired. 

Next to my inn at Miyaji and right under my eyes was a large 
temple. Miyaji has a very rustic appearance embowered in its many 



FROM BUNCO TO HIZEN 265 

trees. Far beyond, the great wall of the crater cuts off the out- 
side world leaving one even rim of horizon as at sea. The temple, 
though so situated in the midst of the little town, had all the 
advantages of situation and something of a pretence of a village 
green. The lines of the Japanese roof are very beautiful. Even 
an ugly town is a constant source of pleasure to one looking from 
above. The same cannot be said as to their g-eneral use of wood. 
The aspect of a Swiss or Norway village, or the half timber work 
of some old French or English towns, is far more picturesque than 
anything of similar nature in Japan. We do not have to go to 
Japan for lessons in Avood carving. The carving at Nikko is 
very handsome, although I think most Europeans will take at least 
equal pleasure in that of the Haruna temple near Ikao, but most of 
us will give the preference to the beautiful stall and screen work 
found in so many European churches and cathedrals. 

The people of the inn were by no means such early risers as is 
usually found in Japanese inns. It was nearly eight o'clock before 
the rain doors were pushed back, but an hour later I was again on 
my way along the shaded road, or rather what would have been 
the shaded road, for the first part of my journey was made in 
a downpour. The valley is drained on this side so we made our 
exit by the side of the Shirakawa flowing into the Shimabara Gulf, 
near the city of Kumamoto. We were soon amid pretty valley 
scenery again, the way being all down-hill to the tree-dotted plain 
on which Kumamoto lies. To judge from the rather unfavourable 
way in which many foreigners speak of it as a dusty, dirty town, 
Kumamoto belies its appearance, for there is far more green about 
in the way of trees than is found in most large Japanese cities. 
It rejoices in two excellent Yadoyas, one of which is so up to date 
as to be supplied with a billiard room. It is possible to cross from 
here to Shiobara and walk up the mountain to Unzen, which stands 
2500 feet above sea level and which means just that much climb. 
It is equally feasible to take train to Isehaya and by a pretty 
ricksha ride to Obama and from there walk up the mountain. 
These Kyushii resorts do not compare favourably with those of 



266 SAKURAMBO 

the Tokyo district, which can be described as " the cream " of 
Japan. Unzen is on a very uneasy seat, and if the safety valve at 
Asosan should become plugged up it is quite on the cards that 
Unzen would be the point of least resistance and depart for parts 
unknown, leaving nothing but a little stinking sulphurous smoke 
and reputation behind it. It is a great health resort and has 
several European hotels largely frequented by Europeans from 
the China ports. There are hot pools and tiny geysers and beauti- 
ful walks in the neighbourhood, but even in early June it was very 
hot during the day although the nights were pleasant. Up to 
that time Obama on the seashore at the foot of the mountain holds 
many of the people. This, too, is a bathing resort, in some ways 
an attractive little place, especially as it makes no pretence at 
business of any kind. 

A little steamer ran daily from Obama to Mogi and on this 
craft I saw the only really decent pigs I have seen in Japan. Pigs 
of an avoirdupois that Chicago would be glad to acknowledge, I 
was told that they came from China in which case someone was 
enterprising enough to try and improve the native stock. Of our 
ordinary farm stock you see little in Japan. It is rare to see any 
kind of pig in the villages. Sheep, grazing cattle, mules, are the 
rarities of an enclosure more of the nature of a zoological garden. 
Chickens, dogs, and cats, are the only familiar features of animal 
life familiar to European eyes. Once in Mogi it is but an hour's 
run across the hill to Nagasaki. The home of Madame Chrysan- 
theme is entirely distinct and apart from the other treaty ports of 
Japan. It is most picturesque on its hills overlooking its beautiful 
harbour, but there the attraction ceases. From May on it is hot 
and stinking. Its coolies are the roughest and dirtiest in Japan. 
Its sailors' hotels and bars with their " hurdy-gurdies," barrel 
organs, and bouncers as a conspicuous feature, mark it out for the 
" man-of-war " town of the islands. One must say with regret 
that the place which has had longest contact with Europe in the 
shape of its shipping is the most undesirable town in Japan. 
Nagasaki gives a very false impression of Japan. It is cosmopoli- 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 267 

tan in a crude bucolic way. Cosmopolitan as were the buccaneers 
of old. At a little distance lies the great naval port of Saseho 
with its lines of warships. In Nagasaki at the drydock lies a 
great steamer of the Nippon Yusen Kwaisha. The plates of both 
came from foreign lands in such ships as crowd the harbour lying 
under our eyes. When Japan, as the result of a great national 
industry and out of her own iron, makes those plates, Saseho will 
be far more formidable than it is to-day. 



VIII 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 

" When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction 
over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, 
little expecting the curiosity of future ages should com- 
ment upon their ashes ; and, having no old experience of 
the duration of their relics, held no opinion of such after 
considerations. But who knows the fate of his bones, or 
how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of 
his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered." 

— Urn Burial. 

I am standing on the terrace of Miidera looking down on 
Biwa Lake shining in the sun. The terrace is a delightful place 
on the hot July day and the cool breeze sweeping over it a reward 
for the stiff climb to get up to it. The temple is an old foundation 
dating from the close of the seventh century in the time of the 
Emperor Tenji of whom that old collection of Dry-as-Dust the O 
Dai Ichiran* says " he loved the sciences, and the administration 
of public affairs and justice were under his rule established on a 
regular and stable basis." The present set of buildings are any- 
thing but veterans, however, for they only date from the end of the 
seventeenth century. Otsu Hes just below and very glad am I to 
get away from it, for I remember it mainly by a very indifferent 
inn. To the left on the shores of the lake is what looks like a 
grove of pines, but which in fact is a single tree, the great pine of 
Karasaki, one of those venerable abortions referred to in the first 
chapter. It is said to be ninety feet in height, although one would 

* The C3 Dai Ichiran has been translated by Klaproth. Checked up on 
material points from other sources there is a good deal of meat to be scraped 
off its old bones. I am also indebted to Professor B. H. Chamberlain's trans- 
lation and particularly the notes and preface to the Kojishi. Anyone whO' 
wishes to read the last word on the early nebulous history of the Japanese must 
have recourse to this translation. It is published separately as the supplement 
to vol. X of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. 

268 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 9.69 

never suspect it, and its branches in two directions extend a dis 
tance of nearly a hundred yards which can readily be believed. 
Its bark is almost hidden by its plastered wounds, and the props to 
its old age make it resemble some distorted banyan whose subsid- 
iary aerial roots have subsequently dried and withered. The road 
to it is too hot and sunny on this summer day, and I turn with 
relief to seek shade in the beautiful groves surrounding the shrines. 
These have a romance entirely apart from the ecclesiastical associ- 
ations, for we hear much of Benkei, the giant retainer of Yosh- 
itsune, the brother of Yoritomo, first of the Minamoto Shoguns 
and of the warrior class, who supplanted the more effeminate Fuji- 
wara as mayors of the palace. Benkei appeals much to the imag- 
ination of western readers. There is a joviality, an open-handed, 
open-hearted, debonair touch to most of his exploits not found in the 
usual run of the Japanese heroes. His cunning is mainly free 
from that tinge of treachery and double dealing with double 
meaning so common in the East. He is a sort of Little John, Will 
Scarlet, and Friar Tuck, rolled into one; and his master, Yoshit- 
:sune, is the Japanese Black Prince or Henry V., and whom we 
would gladly see supplant his cold and crafty brother at Kama- 
kura. Benkei and Yoshitsune first met on a bridge in Kyoto when 
Benkei proposed to the unknown stripling that he should con- 
tribute what his present circumstances permitted to the lining of 
Benkei's purse. In the fight that ensued Benkei got the worst of 
it, and ever after attached himself to Yoshitsune's adventurous 
fortunes. These have been the theme of a number of books for 
the young Japanese, and Benkei figures in them almost as much as 
Yoshitsune. We have proof of his prowess here at Miidera, for 
in one building is kept the temple bell which he carried off, and 
■only restored on condition that the monks fill a huge iron caldron 
of equal size with bean soup. The marks of Benkei's teeth are 
new shown on the edge of the caldron. 

But Benkei is by no means the only militant feature of these 
hillsides, for it was on Hiesan that Denkiotaishi founded at the 
beginning of the ninth century a monastery of the Tendai sect of 



270 SAKURAMBO 

Buddhists, and in the course of years they were dotted with temple 
buildings, the strongholds of military orders of monks which can 
only be compared to the great military monastic orders of Europe. 
The monks ruled things with a high hand, and time and again 
harried the country roundabout, fighting out their quarrels in the 
streets of Kyoto and burning down half the town in the process. 
For three hundred years they were regular visitants here at 
Miidera. The place was attacked and burnt to the ground in 
1 08 1 and regularly during the course of a century it suffered a like 
fate. These monks had the same reputation for fierce courage, 
learning, and brutality as the Templars of old, of whom the people 
whispered tales of their lust and nameless crimes as they clanked 
through the streets on their great war horses. It was not until 
Nobunaga had established his power in the State that he dared to 
attack " these pestilent monks," and September, 1571, saw a great 
battle on the slopes of these mountains in which the monks, driven 
back inch by inch by the overwhelming numbers of their adversary, 
finally perished in the flames of their monasteries and wiped out the 
remembrance of their crimes with their blood. But Biwa-ko, or 
better the Lake of Omi, has a better ground to fame than attaches 
to priestly masters. There is a legend that at the beginning of 
the reign of the Emperor Ko-rei (286 B. C.) there was a great 
earthquake and eruption during which Fujisan was thrown up 
and a depression formed here in the South. At all events, since 
the very earliest days, while Yamato has been the scene of the 
exploits of its emperors, much is heard of the Lake of Omi, and as 
literature and song were advanced it figures more and more largely 
in such literature, so much so as to almost make it a centre for 
Japanese men of letters. The Kwanto, or present Tokyo district, 
was a frontier land far from all the finer influences shed from 
the emperor's court at Kyoto, a centre of rough soldiers engaged 
in warfare with each other and with the savages still pressing on 
them to the north. It is not until Yoritomo fixed his capital at 
Kamakura that the northern country cuts any polite figure in Jap- 
anese history. We have already spoken of the absence of antiquity 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 271 

in most Japanese landscapes. Perhaps this very Go-Kinai district 
is as good an instance as can be selected. Here is the very centre 
of Japanese life. The umbilicus, so to speak, around which the 
nation lived its life for so many centuries, shows but little sign of 
that life. Nara and Kyoto are all that are left of the very ancient 
days. Even then much is of fourteenth century and later. One 
Can well speak of this, for so much is heard of the antiquity of 
Japanese life. There are literally scores of fine manor houses 
scattered all over England, contemporaries and far older than 
these fourteenth century buildings. Old castles dating from Nor- 
man times have worked into their foundations the previous struc- 
ture built by the Roman masters of the world, utilized by their suc- 
cessors, and still sheltering present owners. There are old county 
families living on the ground occupied by their ancestors from 
Saxon times and that on the very good historical record of title 
deeds; and some Welsh genealogies will satisfy the seeker after 
still dimmer tradition, for they go back to Adam and sometimes 
to his Maker. Equal credit can be claimed for these old county 
families with any Fujiwara, or Taira, or Minamoto, that figures in 
the Kojiki and trod the soil of Yamato. But if we mean to get on 
to the subject of the antiquities of " things Japanese " it is time to 
change our ground, so I come down the shady groves of Miidera 
to the dusty level of the town, stopping a moment to watch the 
jDoats on the canal dug centuries ago and which leads through (not 
over) the mountains to the level of the Ky5to plain, and gladly 
picking up my traps at the inn, am off across country to Yamada, 
.the holy, to the temples of Ise, where Ama-terasu-oho-mi-kami, 
the Heaven shining Great August Deity, the sun goddess, has her 
shrine, and to which Japanese Mecca all true Japanese hearts are 
turned. 

It is cross country to Yamada, and cross country in Japan 
means much what it does everywhere else, a series of changes at 
short intervals in which more time is spent at junction stations than 
on the train. The ride was rather a dull one until running south 
on the line that terminates at Yamada. I found the town in one of 



272 SAKURAMBO 

its quiet periods, there being comparatively few pilgrims visible 
tramping the streets. The temples are given a great age by the 
Japanese, carrying them back to the legendary period of Suinin 
(29 B. C.-70 A. D.), who charged his daughter Princess Yamato 
to build a temple to Tenshi Dai j in, the sun goddess, on the banks 
of the Goyusugawa in Ise, which since then has been the centre 
of the Shinto cult. The temples are doubly interesting therefore 
as the external expression of a national faith. We cannot give 
Shinto a very high rank as a religion. Its central idea has none 
of that grandeur that is an attribute of the central ideas of the 
great world religions — Brahminism, Buddhism, Judaism and 
Christianity and Mohammedanism — and which is so grandly ex- 
pressed in their architecture. Shinto is a strictly local creed, so 
wrapped up in the nationality of its worshippers that it can have 
no extension beyond them. In fact, it is a worship of the en- 
shrined nation. Mr. Lowell, in his " Occult Japan," calls attention 
to the fact that Japanese holy places have no foreign worshippers. 
They are not the goal of thousands of pilgrims from other lands. 
They could not have them. Only the land itself can be interested 
in its own ancestors, and the holy places of other creeds are in 
other lands. Shinto shows its limitations in this external exposi- 
tion of its spirits. The temples are simply an exaggeration of th^ 
native architecture^ They are supposed to represent accurately 
the shape and material of the original native hut so completely does 
this nation worship the past. They are destroyed every twenty 
years and re-erected on an alternate site adjoining each temple. 
As the wind waves the white curtain hung in front of the man 
or great gate one gets glimpses of the exterior. It is doubtful, 
even if they were accessible to the public and the infidel, whether 
there would be anything to see. The main thing about them is 
their spirit; and the beautiful sweep of the thatched roofs, with 
the towering cryptomerias, leave one with the impression that he 
has been in touch with the religious sense of a curious people. 
One can well remove his hat as he stands before the white curtain 
scantily concealing the soul of this people as shown in their holiest 
of holies. 



FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN 273 

We can leave the religious side, however, to take up the less 
pleasing side of history wherein the foreign grubber complains so 
strenuously that he finds more romance than fact. History made 
to order is not very considerately regarded in the more truthful 
West, and one can hardly help something of a smile when he reads 
in a Japanese author that historical research as such was not 
known in Japan, their historians all bearing an official character. 
The revision and " correction " of previous records is a frequent 
occurrence noted in the old chronicle, and emperors and ministers 
take a fatherly interest that the offspring of their brain should 
be of credit to them. The old chroniclers therefore wrote — alas 
had to write — with the immediate object of their employers in 
view. They have all the enthusiasm of monkish scribes of old, 
and had as little scruple about altering a date or embroidering their 
tales as in our historical novels. In fact, the more official the man, 
the more we are inclined to look sharply into his local colouring, 
even of facts. One calls to mind those lines of Burns : 

" Some books are lies frae end to end. 
And some great lies were never penned ; 
Ev'n ministers, they hae been kenned, 

In holy rapture, 
A rousing whid, at times, to vend, 

And nail't with Scripture." 

Previous to the Christian era we have no reason to believe that the 
Japanese were anything but a congeries of scattered clans. By 
degrees one of these obtained the supremacy. It is fair to pre- 
sume from what followed the introduction of Chinese learning and 
especially Buddhism, at the close of the fifth and middle of the 
sixth centuries, that their condition was decidedly less advanced 
than that of their Korean neighbours who for some centuries had 
been subjected to Chinese influence, at times under actual conquest 
in north Korea and always by contact through Manchuria. The 
Chinese have given us a picture of Korea as they knew it in the 
two centuries preceding and following our era ; a picture of a 
primitive people living in mud huts, ruled over by petty chiefs, but 
18 



274 SAKURAMBO 

possessed of the arts of agriculture, weaving and iron making, and 
skilful in the chase and in making use of the skins of the animals 
that they killed. During this period the Japanese had frequent 
communication with Korea, mainly in the form of piratical raids, 
but it was not until later, at the end of the fifth century, that they 
shared more positively in the advantages which their Korean 
neighbours had been drawing from their civilized neighbour China, 
and Korea stands at least a couple of centuries in advance of 
Japan. At the end of the fifth century the Chinese books were 
formally introduced into Japan. The best authorities all reject 
the idea of a native Japanese script existing before this period; 
the only means existing in earlier times of handing down to pos- 
terity the records of the past was by oral tradition. Between the 
formal introduction of the Chinese books, however, and the publi- 
cation of the earliest extant work on Japanese history — the Kojiki 
— it is fair to presume that the Chinese ideograph had come into 
general use and was used in compiling current records and in 
putting in more permanent form past tradition. The Kojiki 
(687-712 A. D.) hints at this, and although the writer says he 
took it down from the mouth of the learned Hiyeda-no-Are, the 
man with the india rubber memory selected by the Emperor 
Temmu to thoroughly memorize the wise saws and events of 
former days, we will give him credit for some documentary 
corroboration in front of him at the time he wrote. As to his 
own production the less said the better. Someone in the presence 
of Coleridge happened to refer to Klopstock as the German Milton. 
" And a very German Milton " quoth Coleridge. The Kojiki can 
perhaps be classed as the Japanese Homer — and a very Japanese 
Homer it is. Professor Chamberlain in his introduction tells us 
that as *' the ' Records ' sound bald and C[ueer in English, so they 
sound queer and bald in Japanese." They are made up of folk- 
lore tales and legends of the gods bound together by long-winded 
genealogies, which frankly seem to be nothing but a nexus, arti- 
ficially adopted by the writer to bind his work into some sort of 
semblance to an organic whole, matter that previously had no real 
connection. 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 2T5 

Japanese mythology does not err on the side of modesty. 
The Age of the Gods is divided into two periods, one of a thousand 
milhon years, the other of 836,702, and it is a pity that in this 
last the days and hours also are not given. If we can trust to 
such computation all our geological problems are easily settled, 
for it can include the requirements of the most extravagant 
evolutionist. It is noticeable that the Japanese do not attempt 
any ultimate explanation of the universe. Chaos exists, and it is 
out of this chaos that the early gods are born only to disappear 
again, " hide their persons — i.e., died." They have no apparent 
connection with each other. Their propagation is cosmical not 
carnal. They come and go, and as far as the writer of the Kojiki 
is concerned, merely furnish an introduction to his more serious 
matter. It will be well to give one of the shortest of these 
genealogies. It is typical of the nexi binding the book together, 
whether at this point or at its close when devoted to the affairs 
of the more earthly emperors. Some of them run on page, follow- 
ing page in monotonous succession. The following is Professor 
Chamberlain's translation of " the Seven Divine Generations " : 
" The names of the Deities that were born next were the Earthly- 
Eternally-Standing-Deity, next the Luxuriant-Integrating Master- 
Deity. These two Deities were likewise Deities born alone, and 
hid their persons. The names of the Deities that were born next 
were the Deity Mud-Earth-Lord, next his younger sister the Deity 
Mud-Earth-J.ady ; next the Germ-Integrating-Deity , next his 
younger sister the Life-Integrating-Deity ; next the Deity Elder- 
of-the-Great-Place, next his younger sister the Deity Elder-Lady- 
of-the-Great- Place; next the Deity Perfect-Exterior, next his 
younger sister the Deity Oh- Awful-Lady ; next the Deity the 
Male-Who-Invites, next his younger sister the Deity the Female- 
Who-Invites." It is hard to class these genealogies. They have 
far less value than their nearest prototype, the genealogies of the 
Book of Pantagruel, without, it may be added,- the touches of 
pungent wit with which from time to time Rabelais enlivened these 
latter. Homer's " Catalogue of the Ships " is cheerful to them. 



276 SAKURAMBO 

With Izana-gi-no-kami, the Deity the Male-Who-Invites, and 
Izana-mi-no-kami, the Deity the Female- Who-Invites, we enter 
OTi the more interesting if nebulous second period of the gods. 
One thing to be noted is the relationship of this pair. Whether 
this is an old tradition adopted as a gloss to cover a similar 
relationship still in favour well in the period of men is beyond 
conjecture. It is certainly the case that with the legendary em- 
perors such a relation was not regarded as unusual, and the term 
" sister and wife of Jove " could well be read into most of the 
annals of those days. 

With Izanagi and Izanami the action advances. Standing on 
the Bridge of Heaven, they pushed down the jewelled spear* and 
stirred with it, curdling the brine and thereby forming an island. 
On this they descend, and by carnal copulation give rise to the 
various islands forming the Japanese archipelago, and subse- 
quently to a list of Deities implying a nature worship devoted to 
articles more or less useful. The last of these, the Fire-Burning- 
Swift-Male-Deity, causes the death of his mother, thereby arousing 
the wrath of Izanagi, who cuts off the head of the offending infant, 
and thereby giving occasion to the author of the Kojiki to string 
out a few more pages of similar matter. Izanagi is much over- 
come with the loss of his wife and there follows an Orpheus and 
Eurydice kind of tale. It will be well to compare it with the 
charming Greek legend or to Ulysses' " Descent to Hell," to see 
how Japan and Greece have handled kindred subjects at the dawn 
of literature. It is a little long but it has the added advantage 
that it is the most interesting and best expressed found in this 
ancient record. We turn again to Professor Chamberlain's trans- 
lation of the Kojiki. 

"Thereupon [His Augustness the Male-Who-Invites], wish- 
ing to meet and see his younger sister Her Augustness the Female- 
Who-Invites, followed after her to the Land of Hades. So when 



* Klaproth says, " Les commentateurs disent que c'est ime expression 
allegorique pour exprimer I'idea de I'amour et de Tattachement des deux sexes ; 
que ces mots designent le membre viril." 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 277 

from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, His 
Augustness the Male-Who-Invites spoke, saying : ' Thine August- 
ness my lovely younger sister ! the lands that I and thou made are 
not yet finished making ; so come back ! Then Her Augustness 
the Female- Who-Invites answered, saying : ' Lamentable, indeed, 
that thou earnest not sooner! I have eaten of the furnace of 
Hades. Nevertheless, as I reverence the entry here of Thine 
Augustness my lovely elder brother, I wish to return. Moreover, 
I will discuss it particularly with the Deities of Hades. Look not 
at me!' Having thus spoken, she went back inside the palace; 
and as she tarried there very long, he could not wait. So having 
taken and broken off one of the end-teeth of the multitudinous 
and close-toothed comb stuck in the august left bunch [of his 
hair], he lit one light and went in and looked. Maggots were 
swarming, and [she was] rotting, and in her head dwelt the 
Great-Thunder, in her breast dwelt the Fire-Thunder, in her belly 
dwelt the Black-Thunder, in her private parts dwelt the Cleaving- 
Thunder, in her left hand dwelt the Young-Thunder, in her right 
hand dwelt the Earth-Thunder, in her left foot dwelt the Rum- 
blingThunder, in her right foot dwelt the Couchant-Thunder : 
altogether eight Thunder-Deities had been born and dwelt there. 
Hereupon his Augustness the Male-Who-Livites, overawed at the 
sight, fled back, whereupon his younger sister Her Augustness the 
Female- Who-Invites, said : ' Thou hast put me to shame,' and at 
once sent the Ugly-Female-of-Hades to pursue him. So His 
Augustness the Male-Who-Invites took his black august head- 
dress and cast it down, and it instantly turned into grapes. While 
she picked them up and ate them, he fled on ; but as she still pur- 
sued him, he took and broke the multitudinous and close-toothed 
comb in the right bunch [of his hair] and cast it down, and it 
instantly turned into bamboo sprouts. While she pulled them up 
and ate them, he fled on. Again later [his younger sister] sent 
the eight Thunder-Deities with a thousand and five hundred war- 
riors of Hades to pursue him. So he, drawing the ten-grasp 
sabre that was augustly girded on him, fled forward brandishing 



278 SAKURAMBO 

it in his back hand ; and as they still pursued, he took, on reaching" 
the base of the Even Pass of Hades, three peaches that were 
growing at its base, and waited and smote [his pursuers there- 
with], so that they all fled back. Then His Augustness the Male- 
Who-Invites announced to the peaches : ' Like as ye have helped 
me, so must ye help all living people in the Central Land of Reed- 
Plains when they shall fall intO' troublous circumstances and be 
harassed ! ' — and he gave [to the peaches] the designation of 
Their Augustnesses Great-Divine-Fruit. Last of all his younger 
sister Her Augustness the Princess- Who-Invites came out herself 
in pursuit. So he drew a thousand-draught rock, and [with it] 
blocked up the Even Pass of Hades, and placed the rock in the 
middle; and they stood opposite to one another and exchanged 
leave-takings ; and Her Augustness the Female- Who-Invites said : 
' My lovely elder brother, thine Augustness ! If thou do like this, 
I will in one day strangle to death a thousand of the folks of thy 
land.' Then His Augustness the Male- Who-Invites replied : ' My 
lovely younger sister. Thine Augustness! If thou do this, I will 
in one day set up a thousand and five hundred parturition-houses. 
In this manner each day a thousand people would surely die, and 
each day a thousand and five hundred people would surely be 
born.' So Her Augustness the Female- Who-Invites is called the 
Great-Deity-of-Hade%. Again it is said that, owing to her having 
pursued and reached [her elder brother], she is called the Road- 
Reaching-Great-Deity. Again the rock with which he blocked 
up the Pass of Hades is called the Great-Deity-of-the-Road-Turn- 
ing-Back, and again it is called the Blocking-Great-Deity-of-the- 
Door-of-Hades, so what was called the Even-Pass-of-Hades is 
now called the Ifuya-Pass in the Land of Idzumo." Let us make, 
however, our exit from hell, not with Izanagi but with Ulysses. 
The lines are from Pope's translation and the old Greek poet has 
not gained by the exchange. 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 279 

" Curious to view the kings of ancient days, 
The mighty dead that live in endless praise, 
Resolved I stand ; and haply had surveyed 
The godlike Theseus, and Pirithous' shade; 
But swarms of spectres rose from deepest hell, 
With bloodless visage, and with hideous yell. 
They scream, they shriek ; and groans and dismal sounds 
Stun my scared ears, and pierce hell's utmost bounds. 
No more my heart the dismal din sustains, 
And my cold blood hangs shivering in my veins ; 
Lest Gorgon, rising from the infernal lakes, 
With horrors armed, and curls of hissing snakes. 
Should fix me stiffen'd at the monstrous sight, 
A stony image, in eternal night ! 
Straight from the direful coast to purer air 
I speed my flight, and to my mates repair. 
My mates ascend the ship ; they strike their oars ; 
The mountains lessen, and retreat the shores ; 
Swift o'er the waves we fly ; the freshening gales 
Sing through the shrouds, and stretch the swelling sails." 

Satisfying ourselves with two specimens of the Kojiki we can 
pass over the rest of the Age of the Gods more rapidly. Izanagi 
as he emerges from the land of pollution purifies himself in the 
river, with the result of many new deities being born from his 
garments and his members. The most important to us are the 
Heaven - Shining - Great - August-Deity, Amaterasu-oho-mi-kami, 
born from his august left eye, and His-Brave-Swift-Impetuous- 
Male-Augustness, Take-haya-Susa-no-wo-no-Mikoto, born from 
his august nose. Izanagi distributes his kingdom among his off- 
spring. His Swift-Impetuous-Male-Augustness is the only one 
who sulks, so his father expels " with a divine expulsion," what- 
ever that is, but it does not seem to affect his conduct very favour- 
ably. He visited his sister the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, and plays 
all kinds of pranks on her, breaking down the divisions of her 
rice-fields, generally smashing things like an angry child, and 
finally dropping through the roof of her dwelling a horse that he 
has " flayed backward," whatever that means. She then takes 
alarm and flies, retiring into a cave and leaving all the outer world 
to darkness. The other gods then consult and lure her out by 
strategy, thus restoring the normal condition of affairs, but they 



280 SAKURAMBO 

also sit in judgment on Susa-no-Mikoto and expel him from their 
midst, this time without any divine expulsion. The next story 
also relates to him. He comes to the land of Izumo and here he 
finds an old man and woman with a young girl. The first two are 
in tears and he finds out that the girl is tribute to a dragon that 
dwells in the country and yearly comes to devour his prey. " It 
has one body with eight heads and eight tails. Moreover, on its 
body grows moss, and also hi-no-ki and cryptomerias. Its length 
extends over eight valleys and eight hills," and generally the old 
chronicler shows little skill if plenty of imagination in its delinea- 
tion. Susa-no-Mikoto asks for the girl as his reward, bids the 
old man prepare eight sake (liquor) tubs and leave the rest to him. 
Of course the serpent comes, drinks the sake^ and is subsequently 
slain in its intoxicated sleep by Susa-no-Mikoto. This is quite a 
favourite story of Japanese children and figures in all the 
collections of folklore tales. 

Other stories follow without much forward action until the 
Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity, already allowed something 
of a primacy among the gods, decides to people the earth. There 
is as much backing and filling over who shall undertake this as 
subsequently there was, at times, as to who should succeed to the 
imperial throne which often went begging. The candidate 
finally pitched on rejoiced in the name of His Augustness Heaven- 
Plenty - Earth - Plenty - Heavens - Sun -Height -Prince -Rice -Ear- 
Ruddy-Plenty, and who finally descends into Himuka (modern 
Hiuga) in Kyushu, the large southern island. The only thing 
to be noted here is the locality selected by tradition for this early 
settlement. It is singularly consistent through all its forms, a 
point of some interest seeing that it is this island that directly faces 
the Asiatic continent at its nearest point, Korea. Some method 
must be found to account for the mortality of the imperial line, and 
this is found in the action of Prince Rice-Ears- Ruddy-Plenty who 
insults the Deity Great-Mountain-Possessor by accepting his beau- 
tiful younger daughter the Princess-Blossoming-Brilliantly-Like- 
the-Flowers-of-the-Trees, but sending back the elder daughter 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 281 

Princess Long-as-the-Rocks, who seemed to correspond to her 
name. For this the- Deity Great-Mountain-Possessor curses the 
August offspring and " it is for this reason that down to the 
present day the august Hves of Their Augustnesses the Heavenly 
Sovereigns are not long." 

We are now getting close down to ■ things more mundane. 
Two of the children of Prince Rice-Ears-Ruddy-Plenty were 
Prince Fire-Shine, who was a fisherman, and Prince Fire-Subside, 
who was a hunter. A sort of Jacob and Esau story follows. 
Fire-Subside asks for the loan of his brother's fishing tackle and 
loses the most essential part of it, the hook. Fire-Shine refuses 
all composition, and as Fire-Subside, instead of " seeing him 
furder fust," sits by the sea weeping, one of the sea divinities 
recommends him to take the advice of the Deity Ocean-Possessor. 
He builds a boat and after some adventures with the Deity's 
daughter is finally brought into his presence. He marries the 
daughter, but his wife sees his unhappiness and worms out of him 
the tale of the fish-hook. When the Deity Ocean-Possessor hears 
the tale he summons the fish so as to locate the lost hook which is 
finally found in the throat of the Tai. W^ith this and the Deity's 
blessing and advice how to overcome his brother, he (and pre- 
sumably his wife, for she figures later with him) is sent back to the ■ 
land of mortals, riding on a crocodile who is specifically warned 
not to buck. The worthy pair of brothers are quickly engaged in 
a battle of wits in which, owing to the charm given him by the 
Deity Ocean-Possessor, Fire-Subside is easily victor. Whenever 
his brother attacks him he puts forth the " Tide flowing Jewel " 
and nearly drowns him, until he is ready to cry enough and con- 
sent to serve his younger brother. A note to the Kojiki here tells 
us how the Hayabito, imperial guardsmen, down to historical times 
combined the office of court jesters with that of guardsmen, fulfill- 
ing in their dances and posturing the statement of the Kojiki that 
" down to the present day his (Prince Fire-Shine) various postur- 
ings when drowning are ceaselessly served up." It is the grand- 
son of Prince Fire-Subside who is Prince Kamu-Yamato-ihare- 



282 SAKURAMBO 

biko-no-Mikoto, better known to western ears under his posthu- 
mous name of Jhnmu. 

Now it is plain enough that there is not much of value in an 
historical sense to be wrung out of this part of the Kojiki. Future 
investigation may weave some sort of solar myth out of the 
Heaven-Shining-August-Deity and her difficulties with her brother, 
may connect it with an eclipse or other natural phenomena; and 
so with the tale of the eight-headed serpent, and the White Hare 
of Inaba; and the story of the Nether Distant Land may be con- 
nected with the primitive dwellers of the real land. As for the 
contents of the tales and their expression, they will hardly bear 
serious comparison with the beautiful myths of the Iliad and 
Odyssey. They are decidedly crude and at times grossly obscene 
with the witless obscenity of the clown, and at such places not 
veiled in the harmonious rhythm of Homer's verse. With Jimmu 
Tenno, however, we are, to the average educated Japanese, on 
solid ground. The date, 66y B. C, given to his accession, is an 
entirely untrustworthy one from any point of view, for by simply 
averaging up the lives of the intervening emperors the tale of years 
allowed to each is as unreasonable as that allowed to the old 
Hebrew patriarchs. When material was found carrying back 
the kings of Accad to 5000 B. C. it was seen at once that the scanty 
list here pointed to missing links in the chain, and true enough in 
time most of those links have been discovered and filled in with 
data and with kings whose lives are commensurate with human 
experience. There is no such material here or likelihood of find- 
ing it, for before their first shadowy appearance in history in the 
early centuries of the Christian era we have no reason to believe 
that the Japanese were in any more advanced condition than the 
Britons which Caesar, at a still earlier date, found in Albion. It 
must be remembered that the tale of these days was written hun- 
dreds of years later, when the writer was consciously or uncon- 
sciously drawing on his own experience, and transferring much of 
his surroundings to his paper. Before going on with the Kojiki, 
mention should be made of one of the early Chinese references 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 283 

given in Klaproth's " Introduction," bearing in mind that the 
•date, 667 B. C, given to Jimmu's emigration, is just about as 
trustworthy. Klaproth gives this Chinese tale with the frank 
statement that no trust is to be placed in it. It refers to two 
brothers who, leaving the throne of their father to a younger 
brother, emigrated about 1280 B. C. to found a kingdom among 
the barbarous people dwelling in the north of China. This lasted 
for six centuries and a half, when it was absorbed by conquest by 
its neighbours. The last of the dynasty, Fiicha, committed suicide, 
and his son and grandsons took to the sea, becoming the Wo or 
Japanese. Chinese tradition fixes this at 473 B. C. 

We might make a stop here to make a legitimate comparison 
with the chronologies of the western world, simply to see how the 
Japanese stand in this Age of the Gods in the claim to be an 
ancient nation. With the ancient nations of western Asia and the 
•eastern Mediterranean they and the Aryan nations of Europe have 
no standing at all. Japan was as little thought of as the United 
States or the German Empire in the days preceding the time of the 
Accadian Empire, 5000 B. C. It is to be remembered that from 
4000 B. C. down we have very solid historical records both in 
Egypt and the Valley of the Euphrates. The fourth dynasty was 
building the pyramids in Egypt, the Book of the Dead had been 
formulated, and a great Semitic empire founded in Babylonia. 
In the period that follows, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, 
Phoenicians, and the Hittite-Elamite tribes, were carrying on that 
ferment of civilization out of which two great nations, Assyria 
and Egypt, were rising and making their struggle for supremacy. 
Small indeed seems the time from the legendary date of Jimmu to 
the present day when we add a thousand years to it and come 
down to the year 1500 B. C. Egypt has expelled her shepherd- 
kings, Thothmes III. has conquered all the world known to him 
and has made Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis a marvellous sight 
of temples, palaces, and gardens, to which we crowd to-day to 
gape and wonder at the ruins. The Hebrews are still in captivity 
in Egypt and perhaps groaned as they toiled over these massive 



284 SAKURAMBO 

piles. A hundred years later western Europe comes in view. 
The Etruscans are founding their kingdom in northern Italy and 
the Dorian Greeks are beginning to pour over that ancient Euro- 
pean civilization at Mycenae and in Crete which the latest investi- 
gation is carrying back to an age rivalling that of Egypt. A civil- 
ization showing that eastern Europe in 3500 B. C. was a worthy 
rival of Egypt and Assyria. Two hundred years later, in 1250 
B. C. began authentic Jewish history in the exodus from Egypt, 
and as to the reason of which Egyptian and Jewish authorities 
differ so radically that we cannot hope to reconcile them. Western 
Greece and Asiatic Greece had come to grips and w-ere fighting the 
wars of Troy; and Hiram I. is reigning in Tyre and foreshadow- 
ing that commercial people who were to give Rome herself such 
a tussle. In 970 B. C. Solomon is seated on the Jewish throne 
and the kingdom of the Jews has started on its career. A hun- 
dred years before even Jimmu's shadowy date — viz. : 776 B. C. — 
the Olympiads have been established in Greece. Centuries before 
the adventures of Achilles have become part of the folklore of 
Greece and now the Iliad of " Homer of Chios " has been familiar 
to Greek ears for nearly a hundred years. At Jimmu's date both 
Greece and Rome have well started on their careers, not in the 
land of myth and fable, not as a half savage wandering clan, but 
as great peoples with an architecture and a literature soon to be 
developed to an extent never known in the far eastern world. 
We certainly cannot enter the Japanese among those nations with 
a really ancient history, of which in the western world the Egyp- 
tian fellah and the Jew are still the unchanging element. Italian 
and Greek, still clinging tenaciously to their original soil and 
against the waves of barbarian hordes of the North, are old — 
very old — compared to the Japanese, although they are young 
compared to Hebrew or Fellah. We will have to come much 
further down in our table of comparative chronology before the 
Japanese appear in it. 

If we cannot get much history we can get a good deal of inter- 
esting reading out of the " Japanese Romulus." The legends take 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 285 

on a much more human tint. There is even less of the marvellous 
in them than is found in the accounts of some of the later 
monarchs. It would be interesting to know what pressure of 
time or circumstance started Jimmu and his brother on their 
expedition from their old home in Hitiga. Perhaps his fishermen, 
seeking their prey in more remote waters or blown by tempests to 
Yamato, brought back a pleasing tale of the land to the eastward. 
The emigration and the conquest is made with all the decent regard 
for time that such movements require. We do not find Jimmu 
and his brother at once transferred to Yamato, which leads us to 
believe the writer of the Kojiki is using some old folktale worked 
up by years of oral tradition into more connected form, not piecing 
them together himself. They stop for some time near the Shimo- 
noseki straits and then settle on the Inland Sea in what is now 
the province of Aki. Perhaps Jimmu more than once sailed from 
the harbour of Kure, now the great Japanese naval port of the 
Inland Sea. The tide of invasion is always rolling on, and for 
three years he is occupied in subduing the three provinces to the 
eastward — Bingo, Bitchu, and Bizen, " the land of Kibi." His 
last move is decisive, and he next appears in the promised land of 
Yamato ready to face the struggle which is in front of him. This 
is no light one. The Prince of the land, Tomi, offers a stout resist- 
ance to the invaders. Jimmu's brother is slain in battle and Jimmu 
himself plainly received a check, for he substitutes attacks on the 
flanks of Tomi's country rather than direct invasion. In fact, 
he gets in a pretty bad way, and is only extricated by the aid of 
his divine ancestor, who sends him assistance in the shape of a 
wonderful sword. All Jimmu's army, himself included, have 
been prostrated, " fainted away," but when Jimmu receives this 
weapon and displays it to the sight of the enemy, they are cut 
to pieces merely by its divine power. Organized opposition is 
decidedly lessened against a man with such powerful influence be- 
hind him. Prince Tomi, however, is still heard of as recalcitrant. 
There is of course a good deal of the marvellous mixed with 
much of the human element, but there is a very natural touch of 



286 SAKURAMBO 

the latter. Treachery and cunning are displayed together with 
hard fighting and rash bravery. We seem to be reading of a 
condition of civilization much like that we read of in the German 
folklore tales of Siegfried, and Hagen, and Gunther; only the 
old German stories are much more elaborately and beautifully 
worked up, and there is a real ethical teaching behind their tales of 
blood and warfare. Two of these stories of Jimmu are worth 
giving in some detail. He sends a messenger to two brothers 
named Akeshi who were evidently in arms against his power. 
The nature of the messenger — a crow, eight feet long — we can 
pass over, later on in the chronicle it would have been a man with 
a name eight feet long. Unable to resist by force, one of the 
brothers decides to use treachery, so he invites Jimmu to come 
tO' him, and meanwhile prepares a pitfall in the " palace " to snare 
the king. The younger brother, however, turns traitor and warns 
Jimmu, who pays the visit by deputy. These insist on the elder 
Akeshi entering the palace first and drive him into it at the point 
of their spears. He falls into his own trap, and in that strenuous 
age promptly pays for his treachery with his life. The second 
episode has the natural feature of primitive warfare. The land 
seems to have been in part occupied by cave dwellers, " earth 
spiders " the Kojiki calls them, who lived a particularly outlaw 
existence unconnected with even the primitive government of the 
aborigines. Jimmu goes against them as against brigands; but 
he encompasses them by treachery, inviting them all to a feast 
and stationing his warriors disguised as servants behind them. 
At a signal they are cut down in the midst of their rejoicing. The 
latter part of his reign is far better established. He is imagined 
to have left Hiuga in 667 B. C. and seven years later he builds 
his palace in Yamato and is crowned Emperor or Dairi.* An 
elaborate establishment of guards and ministers is attributed to the 
end of his reign, all of which can be transferred to the preconceived 
ideas of writers influenced by the customs of their own times. 

* "As long as the Emperor is living it is not allowed to use his name in 
speaking of him. He is mentioned under that of his palace — Dairi " — Klaproth. 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 287 

These old stories of Jimmu have a very real value. We see the 
Emperor appearing in the role of a petty Mongol chief, leading 
in person his troops to battle and governing his people directly. 
Everything is on a very small scale. There is here no evidence 
of a great movement by a great people and it can safely be assumed 
that Jimmu's invasion is purely that of a local tribe, not of some 
great wave of continental immigration. And as the movement is 
petty, so also are the means often petty. Jimmu and his men in 
Yamato are much like one of the bands of Northmen who effected 
settlements in southern Europe and gradually made themselves part 
of the land. It would be interesting to know whether these earliest 
invaders had any recruiting from their home province of Hiuga. 
Probably yes, for the movement is slow and continuous, and Jimmu 
has to deal not only with the aborigines but with the chiefs refrac- 
tory to the primacy which he has assumed. 

If we have a decided strain of the human element in Jimmu's 
story we have still more of it in that of his immediate successors. 
Jimmu had several wives, and for two years his throne was in dis- 
pute between his sons by different mothers. One pretendant to 
the throne was finally slain and Suizei ascends the throne in 581 
B. C. These dates and the facts themselves, it should be added, 
are about as reliable as if we should attempt to give dates and credit 
to the wanderings of Ulysses, but they serve the useful role of intro- 
ducing some sort of chronology into this period of legends and 
folklore. There is little to note as to this second emperor except 
the fact that he was a younger son of Jimmu and was chosen 
by his elder brothers to succeed, a precedent often followed in later 
days. The old chronicle skips a few centuries here, bridging the 
interval with pages of genealogy. The next emperor in whose 
reign anything of importance happens is Korei (290-210 B. C), 
for he must have witnessed the elevation of Fuji and formation of 
Biwa Lake to which we have referred. Klaproth also speaks of an 
old Chinese tradition in which the Emperor of China sends his 
physician to find the Elixir of Life. He lands on the islands of the 
East, possibly Japan. This is about as shadowy as the next two 



288 SAKURAMBO 

Japanese emperors who account for the whole period between 209 
and 97 B. C. Both reigns cover a period of sixty years each and 
the emperors hve to the advanced age of a hundred and fifteen 
and a hundred and seventeen years respectively. As far as any 
record is concerned we can well believe there is a lapse in it here. 

As we get down to the Christian Era the details multiply. In 
the reign of Sujin, the tenth emperor (97-30 B. C), the bar- 
barians to the north were troubling and being troubled, and the 
Emperor despatched an army against them, concerning which it 
is worth noting that the emperors have already begun to seek 
substitutes in their warlike role. Hardly is the army on its way 
than he has to call it back to suppress rebellion at home. His 
reign is more noteworthy, however, for the tradition of an embassy 
from Korea at which we can look with some suspicion, for the old 
writers were naturally eager to push back the period of contact 
with the old world just as they were nervously eager to make 
the date of the civilization of their own land as distant as possible. 
We note here a custom in which the Japanese are akin to their 
Tartar neighbours on the continent. It was usual up to the 
reign of Sujin to bury a number of retainers with a deceased chief. 
They were literally " planted " up to their necks in the ground and 
left to starve or have their eyes picked out by the birds, a process 
which anyone who has examined the sharp curved beak of one of 
our ordinary crows can well appreciate. In the Nihongi — a com- 
panion chronicle to the Kojiki — is a description of the funeral 
ceremonies attending the death of Suinin's brother, Yamato-hiko- 
no-Mikoto. Following Mr. Satow's translation, " On this they 
assembled those who had been in his immediate service, and buried 
them all upright round his sepulchre alive. For many days they 
died not, but day and night wept and cried. At last they died and 
rotted. Dogs and crows assembled and ate them. The Mikado, 
hearing the sound of their weeping and crying, felt saddened and 
pained in his heart." Suinin could not sleep, and he offered a 
reward to anyone who would devise a substitute. This was done 
by substituting for the living men and animals clay figures, and 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 289 

the lucky genius who devised this outlet from the difficulty was 
loaded with honours. Probably his wit was stimulated by the 
desire to avoid a like fate. The practice seems to have been 
occasionally enforced much later. 

Sujin's successor Suinin (29 B. C.-70 A. D.) was something 
of a freak, being nearly ten feet high. This did not spare him 
fighting for his throne, and that, too, against domestic treason. 
It is noticeable all through this political period of the emperors that 
their persons and lives were the object of attack. The divinity 
attributed to them was still very slenderly hedged, and it is not until 
they retire from politics much later in history that their sacred 
character appears fully grounded. Suinin's brother-in-law was 
the head and centre of the plot against him, and even his wife was 
involved in it. She was appointed to slay him as he slept, but 
lacked the courage and the Emperor awakened by her tears falling 
on his face quickly learned the story of the plot. Even then he 
does not seem to have been in a position to take immediate action. 
The Queen takes sides with her brother — as a matter of family 
pride — and they perish in the flames of the castle which is attacked 
in force by the Emperor in person; all except the royal infant 
which she sends out to her spouse. Castle, it can be added, by no 
means implies the massive stone structure of later days. They 
were built of wattles and earthworks, and in this particular case 
bags of rice were used as defence. It was not until the sixteenth 
century when Nobunaga built, on a European model furnished by 
the Portuguese, his great castle of Azuchi on Lake Biwa that the 
massive structures exemplified at Nagoya and Himeji were erected. 
We are as yet far beyond the beginning of any written records, but 
we have attributed to this Emperor an elaborate political and re- 
ligious system and also the sending of an embassy to China. A 
very specific account is given of the first wrestling bout which took 
place before him. One of the contestants breaks his leg and dies, 
and the other is granted a small property and becomes known as 
the inventor of clay figures and bijouterie. As in Europe this 
episode shows that the old sports were rough and dangerous. 

19 



^90 SAKURAMBO 

His successor Keiko (71-130 A. D.), a much married man 
and father of eighty children, is far more renowned for one of his 
sons than for the events of his reign. Yamato-take is the Jap- 
anese Hercules, and just when we are getting down so nicely into 
more mundane surroundings this young man sends us packing off 
again into the land of legend. I say Hercules, for the rough and 
ready traits of that hero largely enter into Yamato-take's exploits ; 
but there is also something of the gentler Hiawatha in his composi- 
tion as shown by his later adventures, and perhaps some Japanese 
Longfellow will rise to tell his story in similar strains accentuating 
more that side of his character. His first exploit is decidedly 
strenuous, for he pulls his brother apart, limb from limb, for dis- 
obeying their father. Glad to get rid of such a boisterous son, 
Keiko sends him to subdue two bandit chiefs. He is only sixteen, 
and taking advantage of his youthful appearance disguises himself 
as a woman and enters the camp of the chiefs. These are com- 
pletely deceived and make much of him, feteing and entertaining 
him. When he has them thoroughly off their guard, he draws 
a sword he has concealed under his garments and plunges it into 
the breast of his host seated next to him. The other brother is 
cut down in his flight, only living long enough to give to his slayer 
the name by which he is known afterward, " Bravest in Yamato." 
" As he had .finished saying this, the Prince ripped him up like a 
ripe melon and slew him." Treachery at this date seems the 
favorite method with Yamato-take. Western readers can hardly 
read with unction his adventure with the Izumo bravo. Yamato- 
take first wins his friendship and then slays him by a trick far 
more disastrous to the enemy than the exchange of armour be- 
tween Glaucus and Diomedes. Yamato-take has slipped a wooden 
blade into his scabbard, and jesting proposes that each take the 
weapon of the other. Then he draws the genuine blade and falls 
on his helpless foe, rejoicing, 

" Alas that the sword girded on the Izumo 
" bravo, and wound round with many a 
" creeper, should have no true blade." 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 291 

Much better reading are his adventures against the northern 
barbarians. His aunt, the Priestess of Ize, has given him a magic 
sword — " the Herb-OuelHng Sword " — and he purges the northern 
quarter of the kingdom, the Kwanto, of these pests, although many 
a trap do they lay for him. But his neglect of the gods — like 
many strong men, he is confident in his strength — causes the loss 
of his wife, who sacrifices herself to the sea to calm the storm 
raised by hostile divinities, and to enable her husband to carry out 
his mission in Awa. His next matrimonial venture is not for- 
tunate, for he gives his magic sword to his new wife, and bitterly 
he laments its absence as he pursues the Deity of Mount Ibuki. 
This adversary is far too heavy for him in his defenceless condition 
and causes a " heavy ice rain '" to fall on Yamato-take as he climbs 
the mountain. The hero soon feels the effect of such a battering, 
and in plain terms sickens and dies of pneumonia, which is at least 
one palpable and prosaic fact to get out of the heroic age and the 
Kojiki. We do not require much comparative chronology in this 
period, — wx have run over from Jimmu to Keiko (660 B. C.-130 
A.D. ) . It has been a stirring period in Europe. Greece has waxed 
and waned, after leaving the world a heritage that will probably 
never be ecjualled. The Roman Empire is ready to enter on its de- 
cline after being mistress of the world for the two hundred and fifty 
years from the fall of Carthage. Roman Britain is a flourishing 
colony. France and Spain are great Roman colonies, foundation 
already being laid for two great modern nations. It is only 
beyond the Rhine and in the forests of Sarmatia that the cloud of 
barbarians hangs threatening to overwhelm European civilization 
before that civilization tames its conquerors. Fortunate were 
the Japanese in having the scanty Ebisu instead of hordes of Goths 
and Vandals, Visigoths and Huns to meet in battle. What civil- 
ization they had to develop could only be hampered in such develop- 
ment by domestic discord, and not be in constant danger of attack 
from powerful outside foes. 

More than half a century after Keiko's reign comes one of 
those critical periods in a nation's career. That is if we can place 



292 SAKURAMBO 

any confidence in the national tradition. We need not accept the 
dates that the old chronicle offers here, but there is evidence in 
the contents of the numerous dolmens scattered over this old land 
of Yamato to show that the Japanese had contact with their conti- 
nental neighbours at a period earlier than the introduction of 
Chinese learning. Burial in the dolmens, to be sure, was prac- 
ticed as late as 700 A. D., but some of them perhaps can be attrib- 
uted to a period as early as 200 A. D. Up to this point the tradi- 
tions of the Japanese themselves show a people who have advanced 
to a civilization of about the same grade as that the Romans found 
in Britain a couple of hundred years earlier, and Boadicea and the 
Iceni will perhaps give as good a picture of the times we have been 
describing as any that can be drawn for western readers, and 
then we hear of no such imposing priesthood as the Druids. 
But the contents of these dolmens contain articles of Chinese 
and Korean workmanship, and it is to this time that the old 
chronicles attribute the first invasion of Korea and contact with 
their outside neighbours. Chuai (192-200 A. D.) from all 
accounts had a very short and busy reign. He was mainly en- 
gaged with " plague, pestilence, and famine " and wars with his 
barbarian neighbours. In the midst of his troubles he is ap- 
proached by his Empress Jingo Kogo* who " possessed " by the 
gods tells him theregs a land to the westward flowing in milk and 
honey, and bidding him go conquer it. Chuai probably thought 
he had enough trouble on hand at home. At all events he paid 
but small attention to the divine commands. There is something 
tragic in the death of this puzzled man, sitting brooding over 
the confusion in his kingdom and touching the strings of his lute. 
This is how the Kojiki tells the tale — " ' There is only the great 

* A Japanese writer attributes the origin of the English expression " by 
jingo" to the name of the Japanese Empress. The expression, however, is 
a very old one and far ante-dates the jingle ending with "we don't want to 
fight, but by jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've 
got the money too." Certainly old Peter Motteux uses the expression in his 
translation of the fourth book of Rabelais, which dates it back at least as 
tar as 1694. 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 293 

sea ' (to the westward, he said), ' they are lying Deities,' and he 
pushed away his august kite, did not play on it, and sat silent. 
Then the Deities were very angry, and said : ' Altogether as for 
this empire, it is not a land over which thou oughtest to rule. Do 
thou go to the one road ! ' Hereupon the Prime Minister, the 
Noble Take-uchi, said: '[I am filled with] awe, my Heavenly 
Sovereign! Continue playing thy great august lute.' Then he 
slowly drew his august lute to him, and languidly played on it. 
So almost immediately the sound of the august lute became inaudi- 
ble. On their forthwith lifting a light and looking, [the Heavenly 
Sovereign] was dead." 

One puzzling- feature about this episode is the locality of the 
story. Without warning we find ourselves translated to Kyushu 
and the centre of the Government is no longer in Yamato. The 
Empress Jingo finds herself in an interesting situation — in a double 
sense of the term. The will of the gods must be carried out and at 
the same time some means must be found to prolong her advancing 
pregnancy. This she succeeds in doing and so delays it for three 
years, which is enough to stamp her as a very wonderful personage. 
The judgment of the old Emperor is justified, for Jingo finds it 
necessary to quiet affairs at home. This done she pushes boldly 
forward against her unprepared antagonists who hasten to submit 
and pay tribute. On her return to Japan, and after attending tO' 
her more personal unfinished business, she finds it necessary with 
her infant son Ojin to again move on Yamato where advantage has 
been taken of her absence. Here the chiefs have established them- 
selves on their own account, two sons of Chuai by a concubine lead- 
ing the revolt. Jingo succeeds more by craft than blows and once 
more establishes herself, as regent, on the throne. A very inter- 
esting record of this regency is the first embassy to China, which 
Klaproth tells us is corroborated by the Chinese records. These 
say it took place in 238 A. D. and of course claimed it was an 
embassy bringing tribute to the son of heaven. Japanese his- 
torians of the advanced school reject this Korean conquest by 
Jingo. There is no evidence of such an event having taken place 



294 SAKURAMBO 

and it cannot be identified with any of the raids, more or less 
serious, of which the Koreans kept an account. That a female did 
rule over Japan at this time and that she was a woman of no little 
ability is corroborated by Chinese records. These speak of her as 
Ohime, which is " honourable princess," not a name itself. They 
say that she was chosen by the Japanese to compound their many 
differences and that after her elevation to the throne she lived 
in retirement and was never seen ; that she reigned for many years 
and was succeeded by another female. It is the shrines of Chuai, 
Jingo, and her son Ojin that we have just passed at Usa in Kyushu. 

Ojin (270-312 A. D.) had a long reign. We hear much of 
forced labour in . his times. Public works built by Ainu and 
Koreans. Two features of interest are referred to this period. 
A dispute arises involving great interests and (delicately speaking) 
the personal equation of two of his great nobles. Ojin establishes 
the trial by hot water to determine which one of the two is stretch- 
ing the truth ; as logical and perhaps a more useful procedure than 
egging them on to hammer each other into so much useless pulp on 
a " fenced field." More doubtful is the tale of the introduction of 
Chinese books through Wani, sent from Korea. This is ante- 
dating a story of two hundred years later. Sake, or rice liquor, 
is also introduced in this reign — from Korea — and Ojin shares 
Noah's fate in indulging not wisely but too well. He is canonized, 
however, after his death as Hachiman, the god of war, not as 
Bacchus. 

During the long reign of his successor, Nintoku (313-399 
A. D.), much is heard of public improvements. Lakes and 
channels are dredged out on quite a large scale. The life of 
wandering tribes has settled down into that of a people established 
in the land. The barbarian is less pressing on the attention of 
the growing power. This is no longer centred in the head of a 
warring tribe. The emperor as yet is the genuine head of his 
people, but he is more rex than dux. Nintoku' s improvements 
weighed heavily on his people, but he seemed a reasonable sort of 
man and one who could enter into their difficulties. His memorv is 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 295 

of a pleasant savour in their nostrils, for, finding out their distress, 
he remitted all taxes for several years, not even allowing his own 
palace to be kept in repair by their forced labour, and shifting his 
quarters pretty often in consequence of leaks in the roof. His 
empress was most determined as to her connubial rights and much 
of the record is taken up with Nintoku's endeavours to make peace 
after his numerous infidelities. His successors are a very average 
lot of mortals. The refinement of its neighbours has not yet 
touched the land, and we are in that period corresponding to our 
Anglo-Saxon ancestors when they were still living under their 
tents uninfluenced by civilization or missionaries. 

Nintoku was succeeded by Richiu (400-405 A. D.). His 
reign begins with a rebellion against him headed by his younger 
brother. There are touches in references to these times that recall 
an old Welsh jingle, or rather an old jingle in reference to the 
Welsh. 

" Gryflfyd ap Llewellynn Plym, 
What a name to go to bed with, 
Would fill himself up to the brim 
With gin and rum and bitter beer. 
Anything to swell his head with. 
Gryffyd ap Llewellynn Plym, 
Full of liquor to the brim."- 

The manners of the court are distinctly gross, and the emperor 
nearly loses his life in a fit of intoxication, of which his brother 
takes advantage to head an attack against the palace. RichCvs 
minister, however, loads the unconscious monarch on his back and 
carries him ofi^ to safety, leaving the palace in flames. The throne 
seems no bed of roses. On his death it literally goes begging, and 
it is only by persuasion that Inkyo (412-453 A. D.) consents to 
assume the imperial power.^ It had been decided that of his two 
sons. Prince Karu should succeed him. This prince, however, 
roused a strong party against him by his dissolute action in de- 
bauching his young sister. Absorbed in this guilty passion he fell 
an easy victim to his brother and was banished to the hot springs 
of lyo. The passion seems to have been mutual, for the lady fol- 



296 SAKURAMBO 

lowed him thither, and probably to forestall a separation they 
committed suicide together. Many of these scenes read much like 
the times of Murad IV. The successful brother and Emperor, 
Anko (454-456 A. D.), slays his uncle who had conspired against 
him, and takes his aunt for wife. As her child by her former hus- 
band plays around, Anko tells his wife of his misgivings that the 
child when he grows up will avenge the father. Young as he is 
the child understands the conversation and takes time and his rela- 
tive by the forelock. As soon as the Emperor is asleep he seeks 
a sword and then chops off his head. 

From the year of confusion which follows the Emperor's 
assassination, the boisterous Prince Oho-Hatsuse (later Yuriaku) 
emerges triumphant, and avenges his father the Emperor. All 
through this period the defeated usually commit suicide by stab- 
bing or hanging, in preference to falling into the hands of their 
enemies who treated them in genuine Tartar fashion. Not all 
could be so skillful, however, as old Tsurube, guardian of the child 
prince murderer, who cuts off his own head ! We could believe 
this, perchance, an exaggeration, were it not for the fact that cen- 
turies later, in the reign of Go-Daigo, we find that the general Nitta 
when defeated by Ashikaga Takauji accomplishes the same feat. 
Yfiriaku (455-477 A. D.) had the unenviable reputation of being 
known as the bad emperor. He loved blood and sport and often 
mixed the two, treacHerously murdering his cousin Prince Ichinobe 
while riding peacefully beside him to the chase. It can be imagined 
that the manners of his court were no improvement over the times 
of his predecessors. Even the ladies took a hand at lowering the 
peg and the sake circulated freely. His son died without issue in 
487 A. D. and the direct line came to an end. During the inter- 
regnum a lineal heir was almost despaired of, until accidentally in 
the person of two peasants were identified the lost children of 
Prince Ichinobe, slain by Yuriaku tw^enty-six years before. These 
had fled on the murder of their father and disguised themselves 
as clowns. The Regent of the kingdom on one of his excursions 
comes into their neighbourhood, and the people are summoned to 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 297 

dance before him. During the dance the younger of the brothers 
recites their adventures in a song, and to his great dehght the 
Regent is able to find candidates for the vacant throne. The 
material is inimitable for a comic opera. The younger Genso 
reigns from 485 to 487, during which it is necessary to have a 
remission of taxes. Muretsu, his son, is another bad emperor. 
The details of his amusements cannot be given here. Enough to 
say that he is a thorough degenerate whose match can only be 
found in an emperor like Caligula. It is but a short step, in which 
no events of great importance happened, to the Emperor Kimmei 
(540 A. D.). With his reign and the introduction of Buddhism 
we have taken up elsewhere the modern history of Japan. 

We have at least the satisfaction in this period dating from 
Ojin of feeling that we have gotten beyond the period of mere 
tradition. There is proof that the Japanese had come in contact 
with the more advanced civilization of their continental neighbours. 
We can hardly rety on the statement that the Chinese books were 
brought over in the time of Ojin. Professor Chamberlain has 
pointed out that one of these books was not published until two 
hundred years later, and under the circumstances we must attribute 
something to the zeal of subsequent compilers — one of those 
" rousing whids " to which Burns refers. Fortunately or unfor- 
tunately the peculiar situation of the Japanese has enabled the iso- 
lated development of a race on lines entirely subject to its own 
control. Their neighbours were both un warlike — for example, 
the Korean; and unenterprising — for example, the Chinese. If 
China had been a great warrior nation such as ancient Rome, the 
history of the East would have had a very different development. 
But in addition, there was none of that ferment of nations which 
in Europe prevented the Roman Empire from going into that 
deathlike trance which up to recent times has held the Pacific 
coast of Asia. None of those virile peoples which swarmed from 
the northern forests of Germany and Scandinavia, eager to destroy 
and eager to learn, absorbing the civilization of the conquered, 
and with that active originality of mind which enabled them to 



298 SAKURAMBO 

make such civilization the basis of their own onward development. 
The Japanese, on the contrary, were left to develop on their own 
island kingdom. They are not an original people. They are a 
people who have invented little and adopted much ; and what they 
have adopted has been chosen out by themselves as fitted to their 
peculiar ideas. They have had nothing forced upon them, a 
process which, however, is very wholesome to a nation's life. The 
result is that they have not so much taken the best of every nation 
as they have taken the outward form of the best, and that is a very 
different thing from the inward spirit. However, in this fifth 
century we have got them beyond the days of Boadicea and her 
Iceni. Life is still primitive. One suggestive touch is found in 
an incident connected with the fiery YCiriaku. As this prince was 
hunting, his eye caught the recently erected mansion of one of his 
nobles who indiscreetly had indulged his vanity by erecting a two- 
story dwelling. Now this was a privilege confined to the Em- 
peror. Yuraiku was not slow to assert his rights, and the unfor- 
tunate noble only saved his property, his skin, and the man in it, 
by abject submission and oiling of the imperial palm. The ordi- 
nary house, therefore, of high and low, was a one-storied structure. 
In the very early days it had been built over running water and the 
description Mr. Hitomi gives of such a house recalls to our minds 
similar structures seen in the Philippines and the islands to the 
south of that group. The later house described by Sir Edward 
Satow — with " floor low down, so that the occupants of the build- 
ing as they squatted or lay on this mats, were exposed to the 
stealthy attacks of venomous snakes, which were probably far more 
numerous in the earlier ages when the country was for the most 
part uncultivated . . . the yuka, here translated floor, orig- 
inally nothing but a counter which ran around the sides of the 
hut, the rest of the space being simply a mud floor " — is familiar 
to-day all through the mountain districts, and it is the gradual 
extension of this yiika that makes the Japanese home of to-day. 
It is warfare and the chase, coarse feasts in which the flowing bowl 
is a conspicuous feature, treacherous plots and counterplots, dances 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 299 

mimicking triumph over foes, poetry in which the dominating idea 
is a paean of triumph or passion that makes up the history of this 
epoch. This is a civihzation such as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors 
estabhshed after they had been a half century in Britain, a civil- 
ization v^hich was barbarian compared to that which the Britons 
had inherited from their Roman masters. 

It is not easy to get a chronological parallel at this point, for 
just as Japan is on the edge of her expansion the Roman world 
was breaking up under the hammer of the North. To the Italians 
it is unfair to compare them. It is these latter and the Greek 
settlements in south Italy, who, through all the turmoil of the 
fourth to the eleventh century, carried down the unity of European 
history and art. The Italians are essentially not the heirs but the 
lineal descendants of Rome. In spite of the hordes of German 
barbarians that descended on her and ravaged her soil, her plehs, 
her common people, held their own both in customs and institu- 
tions. If they had no other rallying point they had the Bishop of 
Rome, and to Papal Rome they owe much of their final triumph 
over the invaders. Slowly they emerge again in the tenth century, 
still retaining laws and prejudices, and with their affection for 
these accentuated by hatred of everything connected with the bar- 
barians to whom they owed little but the harsh treatment of the 
" mailed fist " laid on through centuries. The great monarchy of 
the Franks are to inherit and carry on the civilization of Rome. 
They will soon establish their centre at the Roman capital of Gaul, 
Lutetia, now Paris. They perhaps form a better comparison to 
this crude people we have under our eyes in this eastern world. 
Perhaps, also, Kimmei can be safely compared to those Anglo- 
Saxon kings of the Heptarchy antedating the introduction of 
Christianity. With later dates the parallel grows more difficult. 
Europe's dark ages lasted from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, 
from which it gradually began recovery through the withering 
blight of Scholasticism until it flowered again in the Renaissance. 
Japan's dark ages, however, had very much a reverse development. 
After a glorious bursting forth under the contact of Korean and 



300 SAKURAMBO 

Chinese artists in the eighth century the decline began with the 
Taira and Minamoto wars of the twelfth century, and under the 
Ashikaga Shoguns, when the country was a mere congeries of war- 
ring barons we have a true Age of Iron — the Dark Ages of Jap- 
anese Art. It, too, had its Renaissance when Nobunaga finally 
began to give the country a settled and centralized government, 
and under the peaceful years of the Tokugawa it reaches its highest 
development. The Japanese art of the eighth to the tenth century 
is at its height while that of Europe lies palsied under the cloud 
of its incessant strifes. It is not until the twelfth century that 
Europe begins to recover from its paralysis and turn to its ancient 
models; and it is just this period which marks the end of Japan's 
reign of peace and the final retirement of the Emperors. 

There is no great difficulty in understanding the sudden leap 
of the Japanese into civilization. As we have said, while not an 
original people, they have a natural bent toward adapting foreign 
ideas to their uses. The early art as shown at Horyuji is con- 
fessedly by Korean artists. This dates from the end of the seventh 
century, and subsequent development by native artists is rapid and 
of a very high standard ; but it is to be remembered that for two 
hundred years they have been eagerly learning in the school of their 
continental neighbours. The same thing happens with every other 
nation. Barbarian Greece brought into contact with Asia Minor 
at once leaps into a glorious development of its art and literature. 
The beginnings, of course, are there, but being inferior, have not 
been preserved. So with Rome when brought under the inspira- 
tion of Greece, and the Renaissance in Europe gave little sign of 
its coming. This is the case not only with the first efforts of 
nations, but of periods of art within a nation. The flowering 
has been as sudden as with one of nature's products. Although 
Korean brains and native labour probably built and decorated 
the early temples at Nara they had apt pupils, and a time of peace 
during which the Emperors not only reigned but governed, fostered 
its early development, and the Koreans had very different pupils 
from the brave but stupid Britons, who could fight with their arms 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 301 

and be annihilated, instead of fighting with arms and civilization 
and turning the tables on their conquerers. I will not leave 
Yamato with these temples of Ise, but taking the charming rail- 
way ride through the fine gorge scenery to Nara and Sakurai, and 
walking across the picturesque country between Hase and Yoshino, 
take my leave under the shadow of the Yoshimizu Jinja. This 
whole countr}' is a joy to the walker and many a fine temple is 
sprinkled through its groves. Two of them are passed on this 
walk — at Hase and again at Tonomine. In early April the whole 
mountain side at Yoshino is a mass of the pale pink cherry blossom. 
There is a full sweep over the rolling mountain country, the shining 
Yoshinogawa in the valley below, and last but not least is the 
association of this little temple with Japan's greatest hero. I much 
prefer to leave Yamato with Yoshitsune and Benkei in mind rather 
than the shadowy divinityships of the Imperial Line. 



Once more I am in the north, in the Land of Kai. I had 
started from Shoji, and climbing along the trail overhanging Lake 
Motosu reached the narrow ridge barely a score of feet in width 
which cuts us off from the jumbled country to the w^est. The trail 
reminds one somewhat of many similar footways cut in the sides 
of the bare California hills, wnth small indifference as to the steadi- 
ness of head and the ultimate destination of the wayfarer if he 
should ever get started down the steep slopes. There is no sign, 
however, of crotalus horridiis coiled in our pathway to dispute the 
narrow passage, and the scene anything but recalls that far-off 
country. Fuji rises in a beautiful cone across the waters of the 
lake, perhaps better seen from this point than any other, so pure are 
its outlines. As I turn to descend, the view on the other side is 
equally glorious. The big fellows of the Hida ranges, some of 
them nearly the height of Fuji, are piled up into great confused 
masses beyond the Fujikawa. They are forty miles away, but 
even from this distance one can see the rugged uncompromising 
nature of this towerinsf mountain mass laid athwart this main 



302 SAKURAMBO 

island of Hondo. They form a great wall on the side of the Japan 
Sea. Elsewhere narrow valleys shut in by their craggy summits 
twist and turn into the bowels of the mass, but there are few 
mountain passes to carry one out of them and across to the other 
side of the plateau. With a last glance at Fuji I plunge down the 
steep path into the woods, and after a charming walk through the 
valleys, by the side of rushing mountain streams and across the 
intervening ridges, reach Yokkaichibi early in the afternoon. 
Here I am soon afloat on the Fujikawa. The men have little to 
do and we have but a short distance to go. A sail and the idle 
current of the river does all the work and in a couple of hours the 
boat is hauled up on the shore and I march off to cover the three 
miles still necessary to reach the little mountain hamlet of Minobu. 
Minobu is a tiny place, but it is one that makes much noise — 
metaphorically and physically — in this Japanese world. It was 
toward the end of his stormy life that Nichiren settled among 
these mountains, established a shrine, and preached his doctrine of 
regeneration of things spiritual in the Japan of his day. From 
the end of the thirteenth century Namii MyoJw Renge Kyo, '* Oh ! 
The Scripture of the Lotus of the wonderful Law," has resounded 
from the walls of the Minobu temples, the echo of the fervent 
prayers of his disciples and followers. As the old monk felt his 
powers failing, he \ti\ Minobu to come down to the Kwanto plain, 
and died where now is the little village of Ikegami near Tokyo and 
where a splendid temple marks, not his last resting-place but his 
last breathing-place. Nichiren, like most reformers, was unpleas- 
antly polemical and highly obnoxious to the powers that were. His 
followers followed in the train of their chief and many a battle 
was fought in the streets of Kyoto with the enthusiasts of other 
sects. He was banished several times, and Tokimune Ho jo, the 
great regent, finally determined to get rid of him once and for all 
by the simple process that so often recommended itself to rulers 
in those and later days — viz. : chopping off his head. Many will 
remember the scene of the intended execution, the little village of 
Koshigoe opposite Enoshima, where the divine interposition turned 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 303 

aside the executioner's sword. Nichiren evidently did not intend 
to trust to a second miracle, for he quieted down very much after 
this exploit, and on his return from a short period of banishment 
retired here to Minobu. One hears and gets so much of temples 
in Japan that I think the average tourist is more than ready to 
cry enough. Unless one is interested in their old traditions they 
do carry but little attraction. Architecturally most of them are 
uninteresting. If one has seen Nikko and Shiba, Nara, and the 
Hongwanji temples of Kyoto, they carry away with them all the 
idea they could wish of Japanese religious symbols. Minobu, 
however, is one instance that could be added to this list. As we 
stand in the little chapel in which rests the bones of the saint we 
are surrounded by all the art and skill that the native can show 
us in these days. And a blaze of glory it is. The priest and his 
acolyte chant an invocation as they slowly and reverently open 
the pyx, in which rests the crystal vase containing the bones of the 
saint. One cannot help being impressed with the idea that Nichi- 
ren w^as not only a large man politically and polemically, but also 
physically. There are a sight of bones. Indeed, we afterwards 
have far more trust in the wide distribution of some of our western 
saints so liberally scattered among the different churches. If they 
only would not duplicate too often parts of the body strictly limited 
in number, and which stamp some of our holy men as undeniable 
freaks, with fingers b)^ the dozen and teeth by the score, hair 
enough to set up an upholsterer's establishment, and bones enough 
to start a glue factory. 

As we gaze on the bones of Nichiren it is hard to understand 
how such an accidental method of burial by simple interment re- 
mained fastened on the Christian dogma. Opposition to pagan 
methods and the influence of old Jewish custom was of course its 
origin. The East knew not what they did but they undoubtedly 
stumbled on by far the most sanitary method of getting rid of the 
dead, especially as living man has always insisted on keeping the 
remains as near as possible to his dwelling places. Even in these 
days of science, and of which we in the West boast as our special 



304 SAKURAMBO 

inheritance, there is among the body of the population as much 
prejudice against cremation as there was centuries ago. The 
sleek burghers of the average country town — the butcher, the 
baker, the candlestick-maker, and the blacksmith — will meet in 
town council and eloquently denounce typhoid fever and the bad 
water supply, and just as eloquently denounce the heathen practice 
of cremation and the proposition to establish a furnace in the town 
— for anything but garbage. Europe is far less finicky over this 
point than we are in America. In Havana, one of the few Euro- 
pean cities left on the western side of the Atlantic, the rule is 
" no pay, no stay." When the corpse's leasehold expires, unless it 
is renewed he is unceremoniously tumbled out to go on the bone 
heap and make room for fresher material. Leases are short, and 
with the poorer classes are seldom renewed. Minobusan is a 
good example of the Church Militant. As we sit in the gorgeous 
main temple, surrounded with all the paraphernalia and glitter of a 
great creed and listen to its sonorous ritual, we are carried back 
in mind thousands of miles to the other side of the globe. We 
have intentionally carried in many things a parallel to Italian life 
in " Things Japanese." As a people, the Japanese have not that 
careless gayety of the French, that innate spirit of genial scepticism 
which makes the " eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die," the real substratum of the national thought. As little have 
they the gloomy striving to raise things mundane to an ideal basis, 
so common among the Germanic races, a striving of which they 
recognize the uselessness and which degenerates into the exagger- 
ated pessimism of their greatest thinkers. Rather it is that spirit 
so common in Italian and Spanish writers, recognizing the gravity 
of the incubus that rests on man, unable to get away from it in the 
manner of the more volatile Frenchman, unwilling to attempt use- 
less palliation, as with the German races. Shigata ga nai. When 
we see the bands of pilgrims moving through the streets of these 
holy places, raising their monotonous songs, dragging along the 
weaker members and rousing up their spirits with their own holy 
enthusiasm, one calls to mind some of the scenes witnessed at 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 305 

famous shrines of southern Europe. There are no such terrible 
episodes as d'Annunzio describes for us in his " Triumph of Death," 
and for that we can be thankful to the relation of the Japanese 
to his gods; but the colour and glitter, banners and excitement, 
are all there. A temple with the foreground covered with these 
people and their standards, reverently uncovered before the shrine 
which they have tramped miles to reach, putting up their heartfelt 
petitions, almost demands to be heard, can be easily read into 
western manners. The raincoats and broad hats and dark faces 
are but the external husk covering a similar idea. And the 
smooth-shaven, silently observant priests are another phase of the 
same idea, and here as elsewhere represent the triumph of mind 
over matter. 

On a fine morning I was again on my way down the river. 
The Fujikawa below Minobu is a grand stream. I was practically- 
alone with it, for the gulf that existed between the stranger and 
the boatmen — a gulf widened b)'- difference of race, of language, 
and of thought — made us reciprocally so much inert " baggage " 
to each other. I think it is under the shadow of these great 
mountain masses, or gliding under the great vault of the sky 
studded with stars and in the expanse of some such lonely sea as 
the South Pacific, that one gets a more physical nearness to the 
idea of one's humanity as a very trifling item in the makeup of 
this universe. They seem so vast and so old, that our lives are 
really but little more in comparison than the lives of the bright 
coloured insects darting and dodging before our eyes. We cannot 
help thinking, that as they have witnessed the hundreds of thou- 
sands of years past, so they will witness the ages of the future, 
when not only we but even thinkable generations have all gone to 
dust. These same hills, on which we gaze, impassively witnessed 
the antics of strange beasts so utterly foreign to our conception 
that we can only draw a fanciful figure of them from their scanty 
remains and clothe it in the figment of our present experience. 
They will just as impassively witness what comes after us, and of 
which we are so unable to form a conception, that in spite of the 



306 SAKURAMBO 

long record of the past we proudly assume that the future will 
merely be a continuation of to-day and that we are the culmination 
of this gigantic scheme of evolution unfolding before us. Man 
indeed strikes the stars with his lofty head, but he is sometimes 
brought to earth and reality in other ways than the necessity of 
earning bread and butter. 

My men (as usual) put on steam as we approached the sea 
and managed to catch the train and a good " drink present " — a not 
unknown feature of this trip. I stopped for the night at the pleas- 
ant little hot spring of Shiizenji in Izu, which I remember in con- 
nection with one of those upsetting exhibitions which often happen 
in this country of delightful oddities. Shiizenji is noted for a hot 
spring which rises in a rock, the said rock itself rising in the middle 
of the brawling little river. A footbridge crosses to the bath, and 
watching the stream idly one rainy day I saw a Jap carefully step 
on the bridge and make his way to the bath. He did not have on 
much in the way of clothes anyhow, but what he had he deposited 
under a little shelter erected near the bath, and going down to the 
stream, carefully protecting his naked body under his umbrella, 
proceeded to perform his preliminary ablutions — out of the wet. 
As to just what particularly harmful effects are supposed to belong- 
to rain from the sky as distinguished from rain in the river, I am 
still in the dark. Having well washed himself, he went back to take 
the usual stew, and tHe last I noted was his black head just emerg- 
ing from the water — without the umbrella. You lie in your bath 
at Shuzenji with the tumbling waves of the river fairly galloping 
down on top of you and only separated by some boarding and a 
lattice window. A sluice enables you to turn the river into your 
bath and temper its fierce heat to your more or less tender skin. 
Altogether, I was pleased with Shuzenji, and its excellent inns, and 



IX 



NUNC DIMITTIS 

" Straziante dolcezza di quel Novembre sorridente come 
un infermo che ha una tregua al suo patire e sa che e 
I'ultima e assapora la vita che con una grazia novelli gli 
scopre i suoi piu delicati sapori nel punti di abban- 
donarlo." 

— Romanzi del Melegrano. 

What then is the real meaning of this strange civilization 
which we have under our eyes? Its outward seeming is fair 
enough. As we see the really beautiful picture of the Japanese 
home, with the marked respect shown to age by youth ; as we see 
the self-contained courteous demeanor of all classes of society in 
their dealings with each other; as we see the Government care- 
fully watchful to hurry its freshening influence into those corners 
of the national life, whether of education or sanitation, which 
show signs of anaemia; are we not likely to overlook the pivot 
on which the whole structure rests, stable enough while it remains 
in its present condition, but which once out of gear throws the 
whole system back on the resources of its constituent units to find 
that there is no reserve fund ; to find that these units have no basis 
apart from the community, that they are unaccustomed to act 
alone, by laws based on general principles applicable to the whole 
human race, and furthermore to principles having their grounding 
in Nature's general law of compensation — " reaction and action 
are opposite and equal " ? It is hardly necessary to say that I do 
not here refer to the upper classes. As everywhere else, there is in 
that quarter a very undifferentiated product in these modern days. 
They are educated in all the learning of the modern world. Their 
moral and social code, judging by outward results, is not a whit 
different from the man of the same class half way round the world, 
except in that peculiar bias which so limits the Japanese horizon 

307 



308 SAKURAMBO 

and which unconsciously crops out when they deal with " Things 
Japanese." They have ruled the nation — and ruled it thoroughly 
— for fourteen hundred years of authentic history, and it is their 
business now to " sit tight." It is in their relation to the lower 
classes that the Japanese upper classes have failed. They are 
of them but above them, not a part of them. Widely separated 
into a caste to whose level there is no effort made to raise the body 
of the nation. The whole trend of the social training is to empha- 
size this separation and to maintain this leadership of the nation 
in the caste. We have said something of Bushido, that knightly 
code which can be compared to the knightly code of Europe, and 
which in its practical application, misapplication, and lack of appli- 
cation, closely parallels to-day the similar code in force in the 
West. Let us see how far the knightly caste have gone in their 
duty of impressing it on the nation as a means of raising the 
general standard. 

Now it is hardly fair to cull choice extracts from the millionb 
of soldiers' letters and cite them as instances of the delicacy, 
feeling and high standard of the Japanese people at large. There 
are presumably thousands of men of education sprinkled through 
the rank and file of the Japanese army, and the general practice 
of poetical composition through the mass of the people would give 
an idea of them not exactly in accordance with the idea we get of 
them on more prosaJb occasions. For high patriotic sentiment 
and earnestness of purpose such letters can be matched in many 
similar publications made in America and Europe. America and 
England would fare badly, I admit, on the poetic side. We most 
decidedly have no general gift that way; but perhaps the Latin 
nations, and very particularly Germany, would compare quite 
favourably with anything Japanese. Hans has an unaccountable 
poetic strain in his makeup which makes him burst into anything 
ranging in theme from the " Wacht am Rhein " to the " Sorrows 
of Werther." This is not exactly the question. It is rather — 
What is at the bottom of the Japanese character? What remains 
when we strip it of its external wrappings of conventionalism? 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 309 

One of the kindliest and truest of their delineators — as to one side 
of their character — tells us that we will find wrapped up at the 
bottom of the soul of the Japanese a core unbending and hard as a 
stone ; that if once, by any accident of word or deed, you strip the 
covering and strike against the man stripped down to his very 
soul, you will find about as hard, uncompromising, unforgiving 
a character as you can find among any race or people. I think 
a good deal of this is due to the moral code of the nation being 
based on Duty. Love is so unknown that it is hard to find a 
word to express it with our meaning of the term. Carnal love is 
plentifully supplied with terms of endearment. Moral duties run 
through a whole gamut of expressions. Moral love, the kindly 
feeling of the oneness of humanity, goes begging for some ade- 
cjuate form of expression. To this extent the code of the upper 
classes has been imposed on the lower; namely, that the latter 
hear much of Duty. Duty spelt with the largest kind of a capital 
letter. 

The standard imposed on the Japanese people is purely one of 
tradition. Each class is strictly limited to its own bounds, and its 
duty is laid down for each circumstance that may arise toward 
other classes. The separation of each class from other classes is 
not left to the instinctive habit of every man to consort with his 
kind. It is ensured by the most drastic legislation specifically 
directed to crushing out any too great extension of interests among 
the people at large. But this is not enough. To be sure, if the 
general association of men is fostered, they are sure to find com- 
mon ground entirely apart from their immediate pressing interests. 
The sphere will be widened, and the individual man will find him- 
self regarding outside affairs entirely apart from the other units 
making up his immediate society. All the more reason to strictly 
shut him up inside the horizon of his caste. Let us go a step 
farther and shut him up inside the limits of the family. Here is 
sphere enough for his individual aspirations. These we will limit, 
however, by all the powerful bonds of the religious code, and we 
will so entangle all the members of the family in this mesh of 



310 SAKURAMBO 

interacting duties that they will never be able to act except as a unit. 
Now we have our man where we want him. Any event that may 
call up his kindly feelings as an individual must first carefully be 
judged as to how it may affect the other members of this " Siam- 
ese twins " organization. If in the kindness of his heart he 
should violate any of these traditional rules the community will 
inevitably condemn him. The moral desirability of his action has 
nothing to do with it. The community may actually agree in its 
desirability to the particular case, but they cannot afford to have 
the individual set himself up as judge over a matter which may 
influence all. For this reason the rules were framed. It is easy 
to see that every extension of sympathy from class to class was 
thus cut off. An eta or a member of the outlaw class could hope 
for no aid or protection from anything but his insignificance. To 
make any effort to raise or improve these dregs of the State was 
therefore prohibited by the nature of the code. Where, there- 
fore, the code not only does not foster but prohibits that kindly 
interest in things human, it is not hard to see that charity receives 
a severe check at the very source from which it should receive 
encouragement. The State here puts its own interpretation on the 
doctrine of Shinto, " Follow the dictates of your own hearts " sub- 
stituting therefor " Follow the rules." A substitution indeed of 
the Way of Men for the Way of the Gods. 

The State has therefore left nothing of the individual in his 
relation to the community, and it leaves as little in his relation to 
the family. Here, too, all spontaneity is cut off. He is set in the 
midst of formulse which he must have at his fingers ends. Pre- 
cedence is carefully established by rule. He is responsible for 
everybody and they are all responsible for him. He must look at 
the outside world with the average eyes of the family, and we know 
that when an organ is not exercised it soon atrophies. We can 
say outright that his kindness is not a trait of personality. It, too, 
is listed under his duties and its limitations strictly defined. The 
great charity organizations of the West were unknown to the 
Japanese. It is their contact with foreigners that has aroused the 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 311 

spirit of imitation. Stress of modern war — commercial and actual 
— has shown that the old system was ineffective. Where whole 
classes were involved in the general distress it was too much of a 
paradox to expect them to find aid in their own ranks. An aid 
which would have amounted to a general fellowship in starving 
together. It is an interesting instance how great national peril 
aroused people to this feature of their organization, or rather lack 
of organization. Bands of young men went around their neigh- 
bourhoods, ploughing and working the land for the men absent 
fighting at the front. If the same man had been sick or helpless 
with disease he must rely on just the amount of aid his family can 
give him and they may be nearly as badly off themselves. Now it 
seems to me that in his lack of individuality there is a very serious 
lapse in the Japanese character. It consists in that feature known 
as self-control. We all know of the man who is " legally honest." 
Who as long as he does not transgress the criminal code is a 
good man. We do not think much of him in the West and are 
rather glad when he shaves a bit too close and gets landed in the 
District Attorney's office. Now our self-control is both national 
and individual, and it is very admirably developed in many ways 
in our western world and very largely due to the abnormal develop- 
ment of our individualism. As far as the individual is concerned 
the wrath of the community falls far more heavily than when the 
shield of the family is interposed to take the responsibility and 
settle for his acts. A man, therefore, facing the community alone, 
is far more careful in what his acts imply. He judges them 
according to his own personal resources, and as to how far he is 
able to stand the shock if they should be questioned. He cannot 
be careless as to results. Now this sort of a man is likely to have 
a pretty wide sweep in his mental horizon. He is human and he 
is weak, and knows his weakness and can understand and sympa- 
thize with it in others. The wider his outlook the more easily he 
can overlook the mistakes of those less gifted. You can put it 
down to the fact that he sees the limitations of and dangers arising 
from any evil deed and hence he avoids it, or you can put it down 



312 SAKURAMBO 

to a perception of unimportance of any single action in the great 
round of the world's life; but his self-control is not limited by- 
rules and regulations, it is limited by the wider vision of his 
personal experience. Thousands of men in the West are governed 
by rules and regulations and the desire to keep within the law, 
but this class of higher men, it seems to me, is much more exten- 
sively developed West than East. He permeates all classes of 
society, and you find the man who would not do an unfair thing, 
who despises chicanery, whose field of charity is only limited by 
his resources, quite as often among the lower classes as among the 
higher. And the more rules you pile on, the less you develop this 
spirit. 

Japanese self-control seems to me decidedly negative. It is 
based on the grinding down of the individual under the friction of 
endless rules.- You can hardly ascribe any high position to an 
individual's actions when he is acting not as individual but as 
community; when his standard is simply one of tradition and not 
based on the higher one of moral right. It must be confessed it 
is not his fault. If the Japanese merchant conducted his business 
on principles based on Bushido certainly not a word of complaint 
would be heard of his methods. In fact, he would probably be 
stripped to his skin by his rivals, for the knightly code of gracefully 
tendering the sun to pne's adversary would hardly answer in these 
strenuous days. But if his life, apart from business, was based on 
Bushido he would have evolved a much better business code than 
he has been able to do out of Duty. With a better code, however, 
he was not allowed to meddle. Left to himself the game has been 
to the craftiest, with no umpire of higher standard to see that it 
was played fairly. The high standard of the upper class cannot 
be applied down in the scale where men were strictly confined 
within their own limits of thought as applied to their means of 
■ livelihood. Hence we find the farmer ranked next to the soldier, 
then the artisan — and last of all the man who lives by his wits, the 
merchant and middleman. But they are all a-brave people. Island 
races usually are brave. And intensely national, sometimes amus- 



THE LAND OF YAMATO 313 

ingly so. There are few low-class Japanese who would not prefer 
their stinking tobacco to an Havana cigar. Among their man- 
hood you will rarely find that openness of the western disposition 
which is such a gracious feature of the West. The westerner is 
not afraid to express his humanity. He rarely has anything to 
conceal. His very speech is open and direct. Not so the east- 
erner. Much weight is to be given to words, and more especially 
to the ideographs expressing words, and which may have very dif- 
ferent meanings under the same sound. And as his language is 
doubtful so at times are his methods. His national means of 
defence is Jiu-Jitsu and much was heard of it until its exponents 
displayed it pro forma to the foreign public. The American Press 
on the whole was rather unanimous on the subject of Jiu-Jitsit. I 
remember an editorial on the subject in a paper rather given to 
the heavy side of guiding public opinion and rarely descending into 
such fields for editorial exposition. Jiu-Jitsu was freely de- 
nounced as the apotheosis of the foul blow which the Anglo-Saxon 
had taken such pains to eliminate from his sports. Jiu-Jitsu as an 
athletic institution was rather downed by the husky athletes of 
West Point vi et armis, which, let us hope, obviates any danger of 
its adoption as a national institution in America. 

One must admire the Japanese wit and their ingenuity in the 
small things which every toy shop displays. Countless ingenious 
toys show that what the race needed was polish with other wits to 
develop its best. A people of course must be held responsible for 
their own actions, but the Japanese owe a heavy grudge to the 
men who shut them out of the race for so many years. Much do 
they owe to the selfishness of the caste who had so little foresight 
and ambition as to support their rulers in such action. The people 
never make themselves heard. Submissively they accepted the 
iron chain that Chinese philosophy threw around them. It seems 
to be in the Mongol blood, this submission to the past. Their very 
guilds are based on it. The development of the Commons, the 
rise of great free cities like the Italian Communes or the Hanse 
towns, was an impossibility with this race. They have adopted 



314 SAKURAMBO 

it from the western world; whether they can develop any of the 
great problems of modern times is doubtful. They have certainly 
shown no such qualities in their seclusion. Beautiful brush work, 
intricate and spirited carvings in miniature, elaborate embroider- 
ies, lacquer with a smoothness and strength never surpassed; but 
their material civilization has stood still. Mentally, perhaps, they 
are a proof of a statement often made, that man's philosophical 
attainments have never gotten beyond that Golden Age of the world, 
when India and China in the East and Greece in the West not only 
laid its foundations but built the magnificent superstructure. We 
base our philosophy to-day on the old Greek philosophy and merely 
have adapted its tenets to our modern materialism. It is to be 
hoped that before the old system of mutual courtesy is worn away 
that some substitute will be found to take its place. Strip the Jap- 
anese of their traditional politeness, they have as yet little to fall 
back on, and withotit it they would be unbearable. The views of 
foreigners as to the Japanese differ much according to the point 
of view, and it is no easy matter to strike the balance between the 
discords. The Japanese take care that those attached to the 
Legations shall see the pleasant side, and hence from such circles a 
chorus of praise can be said to arise, only neutralized by the 
unsparing anathemas of the foreign merchants who often see only 
the bad side of the people. If you discount his professional bias 
perhaps the fair-minded missionary — and there are such men — will 
give you a better idea of the Japanese people than any other resi- 
dent foreigner. He is certainly far closer to their daily life than 
either of the other two classes, but he must be caught out of 
business hours and not allowed to talk ex cathedra. 

We have then a people with all the traits of a highly civilized 
society together with many primitive ones crystallized into their 
system by the early adoption of an unbending formula within 
which only the system can develop. Let us turn for a moment 
to look at our western civilization and see how the guiding power 
acts there. The people make themselves heard. Both the Ger- 
man " folk " and the Roman " plebs " have political value, that in 



NUNC DIMITIS 315 

the case of the latter lasts clown to the time of the Empire, and in 
the case of the former clown to the establishment of the feudal 
system in the seventh century. In the earliest days of such interpre- 
tation — the days of the feudal system and the beginnings of the 
canon law — the king is such " by divine right." not by his own 
divinity. The people undoubtedly suffered practical extinction 
during these feudal ages, but the spirit was still there nourished 
by all the prejudices of the race, and the feudal system by its very 
constitution — its diversit}^ of interest between lord and fiefholder — 
carried in it the seeds of its death. As the powers became evenly 
balanced, one or the other looked around for allies, and of which 
there was but one source — the People. Whether king and people 
against the nobles, as in France, or barons and people against the 
king, as in England, the people were able to buy their way into 
influence and power. And where the people cut no figure in this 
controversy, in time the State is bound to fall to pieces from the 
heterogeneity of its warring interests, as in Poland. The people 
therefore have been brought into close contact with their leaders. 
The upper and lower classes have gradually coalesced until to-day 
it is the people who largely rule in modern Europe, even in those 
aristocratic states where the privileged classes have managed to 
gain pre-emption in certain high offices — on condition of main- 
taining their efficiency. 

Now the important point here is the close contact of the upper 
and lower classes. The lines fade into each other. And it is not 
the upper classes that have come down to the standard of the 
lower classes, but it is the latter that have risen, and are gradually 
raising themselves. The standard of western life in the upper 
classes is at least as high as anything in the East. I think it is 
higher, inasmuch as the individual rules his conduct on simple 
general principles of ethics unmodified by any code based on 
loyalty to a political system and making that the object of the code. 
Men in the bottom of their souls highly applaud the sentiment, 
'' My Country — right or wrong," and on some occasions we exer- 
cise all our powers of casuistry to make the right of a matter fall 



316 SAKURAMBO 

on our side of the fence. But after all it is not the highest standard 
although it takes rare courage to break with it. We may regard 
the conscientious protest more than once made in America and 
England against national acts as mistaken, but we respect its 
source. I doubt very much if such open dissent from the voice 
of the community as was heard in America at the time of the 
Spanish war, or in England at the time of the Boer war, would be 
tolerated in Japan. The Japanese has not that much width of 
mental horizon. His code always carries a rider attached, that 
it applies to "' Things Japanese," and outside actions must adjust 
themselves to it. He never dreams of widening its range, never 
perhaps suspects the narrowness of such range. 

The relations between upper and lower classes are therefore 
much closer West than East. The lower classes naturally take the 
upper for the model and the responsibility of the latter until recent 
years has been heavy. I say of recent years, for the question of 
standard has become so important, and education has become so 
widely diffused, that even if the existing upper class does not come 
up to former standard, the public, becoming critical, has means 
of examining and making use of high examples of the past. Still, 
on the whole, it is the present tone that rules, and the imitation 
of the upper classes by the lower, even in its foibles and vices, is so 
striking that it has ^iven much material to writers on manners, 
satirists skilled in pointing out many of the weak points of our 
system in the sometimes too faithful caricature thus afforded. 
However, our upper classes on the whole are sound and I think 
this soundness is reflected in the condition of the lower classes, 
which too many are ready to attribute to the " natural goodness " 
in man, although in the primitive specimens of the genus we rarely 
come across its striking traits except in the pages of Cooper. Take 
the standard of decency. There is, to be sure, no harm done where 
prurient thoughts do not enter in connection with many actions 
connected with our animal nature ; but no one will dispute that the 
standard that shoves those acts as -far as possible in the back- 
ground is the higher one. " Ignorance is bliss," it is true, but 



NUNC DIMITIS 317 

there is no particular folly in being wise in this case. Both stand- 
ards may be legitimate in their application, but that does not neces- 
sarily imply the same plane. Now this sense of decency is widely 
diffused through the lower classes of the West. It is by no means 
natural to the western man, and its spread can be clearly traced 
as more and more interest is taken by the upper classes in the 
personal affairs of those beneath them. Kindness to animals is 
another trait, and which found in the West is largely due to in- 
fluence from above, although in this case self-interest largely helps 
in the development of this idea. The experience of the western 
man with animals, as aids to his daily labour, has taught him the 
value of kind treatment. Also he is more independently truthful. 
This he owes to his individualism and his political importance. 
He is a member of the community, not a member of a corporate 
body attached to the community. His rights are based on general 
rights, and the community will support him against the injustice 
of his superior, and he does not hesitate to appeal to it for such 
support. I do not see that we have gained anything in our western 
world by the adoption of the eastern principle in our Trusts and 
Labour Unions, and the monopoly of adjusting disputes to which 
they aspire. Arbitration by the community at large, which often 
has but a remote interest in the matter at issue, is far safer than 
the compromises arranged between clashing interests, and is more 
likely to reach a just decision even if it sweeps the balance entirely 
over to one side. Compromise is sometimes more worthy of de- 
feat than acceptance. Our western man's position to-day is so 
independent that practically he can stand on his own bottom, and 
it is shown by the fact that his " yea " and his *' nay," according 
to the limits of his judgment, is quite as independent and pro- 
nounced as in the upper classes. Here again he is governed largely 
by the best that is accessible to him, and the wideness of his range 
has been more than once shown in the practical sympathy extended 
to the struggles of other peoples and to his forbearance. More 
than once have political leaders wished to take advantage of 
embarrassing conditions to strike at possible rivals, and more than 



818 SAKURAMBO 

once has the voice of the people been heard with an emphatic — 
" No." 

Again, I think there is a greater feehng for another's pain in 
the West as compared with the East. This is of recent growth. 
It is known with what indifference our ancestors regarded this 
point and looked with calm enjoyment on the most frightful tor- 
tures applied to their fellow creatures. The explanation of this 
callousness has been often given but bears repeating. Namely, 
that before the discovery of chloroform there was so much suffer- 
ing endured by the innocent that one could hardly expect any dis- 
play of sympathy for those found guilty of gross crimes against 
the community. Perhaps this is the case in the East and in 
Japan. They certainly have displayed great indifference to the 
physical suffering which surrounded them, but so much was shared 
by people who had certainly not drawn it on themselves by any 
action that it was taken as part of the course of nature — " shigata 
ga nai." Perhaps as a kindlier view is taken with the removal 
from the old hard times their sympathy will widen. No one can 
criticise it or find finer examples of it within that limited 
sphere in which the code allowed it to exist. Politeness 
is largely a matter of nationality. Among the Latin nations 
custom imposes politeness much as among the Japanese, but 
for many years it has been the attribute of personality not 
the application of'a code. We Anglo-Saxons are not a polite 
people, but I think we are a more trustworthy people. When 
a man gives you his support you have the reasoning, thinking 
man behind you. With the Japanese you have the man trying 
to fit his formula into the situation, and his formula is not always 
broad enough to cover it, or he is not expert enough, or is too 
timid to apply it outside its sphere. I would add also that the 
Japanese is an artist to his finger tips which also the Anglo-Saxon 
is not. In this respect we can compare him to the Italian, who in 
so many other features he parallels. As the westerner has a 
greater sense of his personal value as a man and his obligations 
individually to other men, so we can regret that the Japanese did 



NUNC DIMITIS 319 

not have this trait to develop in his seclusion. Probably the terms 
are contradictory. Such qualifications would rather have given 
rise to a great conquering race, which would not have been content 
with its isolation but would have overrun their passive neighbours. 
But the peasant had no escape from the iron heel of the military, 
who gradually absorbed the monopoly of war and trod him into the 
dirt, there to remain and plough it and interest himself in it alone. 
Thus was the nation retired from its active affairs. It is no 
particular credit to a country to say it never has changed its rulers, 
for it simply implies that in the course of centuries they must have 
stood a good many bad ones. Besides, in the case of the Japanese 
it is not strictly true. The Emperor was soon retired as a figure 
of practical politics. Before this, he is subject to all the accidents 
of political life, including exile and assassination. As soon as he 
is retired, if he aspires to become anything more than a figurehead, 
he is summarily removed by his guardians to make place for a more 
pliable substitute. The Shogunate quickly fell into the same harm- 
less position, and up to the time of lyeyasu the real government of 
the country was a gage of battle earnestly and persistently fought 
for by the men marked, here as elsewhere, by certain personal quali- 
ties of leadership. It was not until the time of lyeyasu that the 
Shogunate coming under the direction of an elaborate political 
system with checks and counter checks reached a position of sta- 
bility that would continue by its own weight and without reference 
to the personality of the nominal head. 

Wrapped up in isolation, the Japanese brought to perfection, 
politically and artistically, a civilization unique in the world's his- 
tory. As to the conditions underlying this fair surface some- 
thing has been said in a previous chapter, and native writers more 
than hint that a cataclysm was impending, which in a sense would 
have been akin to the French Revolution in this far-off outpost of 
the East. But even if we doubt the possibility of a popular move- 
ment in those days it is not hard to see that the system had reached 
the ripeness of its rottenness. As a museum specimen Japan was 
undoubtedly an object of enraptured admiration to the eyes of the 



320 SAKURAMBO 

artist. Let us take one example — from many — of such eulogy; 
the art rather than the actual condition of the country must be 
in the mind of the French writer when he speaks of the dramatic 
events which ended this civilization. " It was the Americans who 
in 1853 charged themselves with the task. Under colour of a 
treaty of amity and commerce, and disregarding the powerless 
protests of Japan, the Yankee brutally thrust into this anachronism 
the regenerating stamp of modern ideas, represented alas ! by the 
band of unscrupulous adventurers, of eager and rapacious contrac- 
tors. Among them glided the devious Chinaman, the common 
enemy, who became at once the indispensable intermediary between 
European and Japanese, the steward or comprador with whom no 
foreign business house could dispense." 

Now this is a serious indictment, and, apart from the fling at 
brutal Americans, it is worth looking into to try and see just what 
is the net balance to be struck in the exchange between East and 
West. Native writers are fairly unanimous in saying that the 
Japanese had reached a crisis in their history ; and it is extremely 
improbable in the face of modern history that Japan would have 
gone for another century or more, during which, after another 
Age of Iron such as followed Minamato and Ashikaga, the recov- 
ery and further development of her art would have progressed. 
It is not easy to see that Japan would have profited in any way if 
the country had be^n opened to foreign intercourse by the gentle 
interposition of Russians or Germans, English, or even French, 
Just how the Japanese regard the events of 1853 does not exactly 
lie on the surface. Of the event the present generation undoubt- 
edly are glad, although they resent the implication of force at the 
bottom of Commodore Perry's demonstration. That this was 
necessary is plain enough to anyone who reads Japanese expres- 
sion contemporary with those events, and the national pride as 
witnessed in the distortion of passing events finds free expression 
in the answer of the Daimyo to the Shogun and in that interesting 
little book translated by Sir E. Satow, the Genji Yume Monoga- 
tari. Now Commodore Perry's motives, even if he was prepared 



NUNC DIMITIS 321 

to use force, were beyond suspicion. They were confined purely to 
obtaining a base of supplies, and proper treatment of the American 
whalers who were building up a great industry in the North 
Pacific, and if possible negotiating a commercial treaty with the 
country. Any question of territorial aggression was absolutely 
barred by the then declared policy of the Republic. Opened on 
these easy terms to the outside world I think the balance of ex- 
change has been rather heavily in favour of Japan. On its 
material side the West gained, temporarily, a market of some mil- 
lions of people entirely unsupplied with a host of modern products 
of which the novelty alone would create a demand. This was no 
small item, and perhaps would not have been indulged in so 
enthusiastically if the commercial mind of that day could have 
foreseen, not a constant and humble consumer but the early crea- 
tion of a formidable rival in the world's markets. The West had 
thrown open to it a full inspection of an art the influence of whose 
beauty and completeness had, however, been discounted by ex- 
amples already known to Europe. Just how far Japanese Art has 
influenced European Art is for artists to say. It has not deviated 
western ideals one jot from their former course. Western artists 
seem to have seen no reason to throw over the. old masters and 
sit at the feet of the Japanese. They have gladly worked the 
best of the Japanese technique into their own methods and such ot 
its spirit as was of value to them and then evenly gone on their 
own way. In religion and philosophy the West could get nothing. 
The western mind is essentially polemical and progressive, and in 
these latter days practical. It is the practical features of Chris- 
tianity that give it such a powerful influence in the West. The 
dreamy contemplative religions of the East could never be of use 
to a man who is all action : with their shadowy philosophies spun out 
of cobwebs and the human brain, not too subtle but too unsubstan- 
tial to be of practical value. The metaphysics of Europe driving 
human search after knowledge into those doubtful regions beyond 
the range of the Practical Reason, still strives to carry into those 
fields the methods and formulae gained by experience. It still 



SAKURAMBO 

strives to remain on a practical basis. Its exposition is mathe- 
matical even when speculative. In science we obtained from the 
Japanese nothing. In politics we see the doubtful advantage of 
organization carried to a very great extreme, and which in the face 
of its obvious defects — the annihilation of the individual — we 
regard as an anachronism and to which advanced western nations 
will never return. In exchange Japan has taken the whole ma- 
terial civilization of the West. What has cost us centuries of toil 
and experiment is handed over with a full explanation of its 
rationale. And it would probably do her good if she would widen 
her range of vision far enough to see and understand the mental 
processes lying behind all this material civilization, for it is the 
spirit that gives rise to things not the material object that is of 
value. We can give all credit to the man who carves the beautiful 
netsukes, polishes the most exquisite lacquers, weaves the intricate 
embroideries, covers temples and shrines with a network of scenes 
from nature and human life wonderful in their spirit and fidelity, 
or paints them with a breadth and subtlety that arouses admira- 
tion ; but we have all this elsewhere, and in addition we have a 
spirit that carries us on, worming out of Nature her secrets and 
enabling man to be a little more efficient in his struggle with 
Nature. It is the efficiency of the nation that counts, and the man 
who can construct a great battleship or the man who discovers 
radium emanations is as great a man ,as a great artist. He gets 
less credit for his work because it is always becoming and never 
crystallizes into a permanent shape. And well it is that this is 
the case, for such crystallization would mean the death of progress. 
Material and mental qualities seem singularly related. They react 
on each other favourably as long as the former is an active 
progressive factor. Halt material progress and we seem to turn 
in on ourselves thus hedged in, and eat our hearts out. It was 
the case in Greece and Rome. And, it can be added, would have 
been the case in Japan had it not been for some Perry to arouse 
her up again. 

" Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature? " 



NUNC DIMITIS 323 

The nature of the land they live in has been accused of influencing 
the stature of the Japanese, a mountain people being supposed to 
diminish in height as they expand. Of the latter quality, however, 
the Japanese have been unfairly deprived by Nature. Too many 
instances to the contrary of this question of height and habitat 
will occur to any one, I think. The Scandinavian inhabits a land 
that can reasonably be described as mountainous ; the average 
Swiss guide is the very reverse of a dwarf; and the average 
Esquimaux anything but a giant. The latter at all events is a 
plain dweller, for he avoids the " Great Ice " of the interior just as 
strenuously as he avoids the inconvenient neighbourhood of icebergs. 
But the nature of any land undoubtedly does react on the spirit of the 
people dwelling in it, and naturally the land they live in has more 
or less influenced the Japanese. The stamp of environment, 
whether on the broad plane of a great continent with its sweeping 
outlines in extenso, or the miniature presentment of a mountainous 
island country, shows itself to the eyes of every traveller. They 
are so characteristic that one could hardly mistake the greater for 
the less. Scenery on broad lines is impossible within the limits of 
an island territory. If the land is flat plain, its outline, by the 
slope in every direction to the sea, betrays its nature. If it has 
been subjected to great upheaval and distortion, within its limited 
space, its confused structure, dissociated from any broad general 
plan, will give rise to suspicion as to its nature. There are few 
apparent exceptions to this rule, and those are susceptible of ex- 
planations. As the great includes the less, sO' the continents will 
generally be found to contain all the scenery typical of true island 
scenery. But all our continents are of vast age. Nature has 
been carving away and softening down their outlines for untold 
centuries. We know that at one time in its history eastern 
America was a great island, and typical of island scenery which, 
however, has been all ground down to a softened type whose 
rounded outlines harmonize with the great Mississippi plain. We 
know that England in Cretaceous and lower Tertiary times was 
part of a great continent bordering on the north the great central 



324 SAKURAMBO 

Mediterranean Sea, which then extended an arm up over what is 
now eastern Russia to the Arctic Ocean. It was a part of such 
continent and not merely connected with it, and age and weathering 
have brought it into harmony with the softer outHnes of the great 
continental plains bordering on the northwestern sea. The only 
island which could be classed as an exception — Australia — is of 
such vast extent as to be a continent in itself, and in age rivals 
the other continents. 

Japan is a true island. It has almost certainly been at one 
time connected with Asia, but the connection has been a bridge. 
It remains to be shown whether it ever was an integral part of 
the continent. The type of scenery found, therefore, is an island 
scenery, and this has been but little softened by time. Its outlines 
are ragged and abrupt. Lying on one of the earth's great lines of 
adjustment, it has been subject to great distortion. The result has 
been one of the most picturesque countries in the world. The 
sharp serrated outlines of the mountain ridges, clothed with green 
from top to bottom, the archipelago nature of the main island 
itself giving entrance to the sea far within its proper limits, the 
abundant rainfall descending in countless cascades and rushing 
mountain streams, which have but a short dash to make before they 
again return their water to the ocean, the numbers of little lakes 
confined within the .tangle of the central mountain mass, the tor- 
tuous mountain valleys opening up new vistas every few miles, the 
abrupt nature of the coast, due to the fact that the islands really 
consist of a main mountain range occupying practically the whole 
of the available ground and leaving but a narrow space to form the 
shore, at times even cutting off this and rising abruptly from the 
ocean itself; all these characteristics imply the very word 
" beauty," which always attaches to a judicious intermingling of 
water and land into a landscape. And yet withal there is some- 
thing which reduces the scale of everything. Fuji loses nothing 
in beauty by the regularity of its cone. It gains immensely by it. 
It is curious how completely such a great mountain enters into the 
miniature of " Things Japanese." It harmonizes completely with 



NUNC DIMITIS 325 

all that fondness for the specific which the Japanese displays. And 
man's specific must naturally confine itself to detail. But it loses 
in grandeur, and in that respect, I think, most people will class it 
below a cone like Mount Tacoma, with its beetling cliffs and peren- 
nial snow-fields and glaciers, or such a great pyramid as the 
Matterhorn, standing savagely isolated among the surrounding 
peaks, or the beautiful spire of the Silberhorn, or the rounded 
domes of Mont Blanc, Jungfrau, or Monte Rosa. The great 
range in Hida and Etchu is of a rougher type and loses something 
of its effect as the peaks rise or seem to rise from a plateau country. 
Prevailing winds, together with the seasonal distribution of the 
rainfall and evaporation, place the snow-line too high to make 
these peaks snow-capped the year round. 

It is, however, as man has modified the scenery that the 
traveller will find the greatest interest. For an old inhabited coun- 
try such as Japan this has been singularly incomplete. When the 
land is available for agricultural purposes every inch of it has been 
used, and the waste places bloom with all that beauty of cultivation 
by which man, giving trimness and neatness, can add so much to 
scenery. In general terms, however, there is none of that exquisite 
finish that is found in most European countries, x^way from the 
agriculturally available, the land is unkempt. There is not that 
beautiful park-like appearance which is so characteristic of Eng- 
. land. Englishmen boast, and justly I think, of this feature of 
their country. It is found elsewhere in districts or on some great 
estate, but is nowhere so universal as to turn almost the whole 
country under man's hand. This is not found in Japan, and their 
mountain and lake scenery suffers from it. We can understand 
" the forest primeval " in vast America, but one can hardly get 
into the spirit of the forest primeval when he has a score of villages 
and hamlets within the sound of a gunshot, or when he rises from 
his absorbed contemplation to find a half a dozen natives con- 
sciously turning their gaze everywhere but at him, although he has 
been the object of their interested and concentrated attention for 
perhaps the last quarter of an hour. The unexpected presence of 



326 SAKURAMBO 

the native is sometimes as startling as must have been Roderick 
Dhu's retainers to Fitz-James. They hterally spring out of the 
ground. The lakes usually visited by foreigners, Hakone, Chu- 
zenji, and Biwa, can certainly be easily matched by the score in 
America. Hakone is only redeemed by the cone of Fuji, for the 
lake itself, with its bare grassy slopes, can lay claim to no great 
beauty. A lake as beautiful as Lake George, or many of the 
Adirondacks or Maine lakes, I have not seen. Most Englishmen 
and Scotchmen, I think, will be loath to admit any superiority in 
this feature of Japanese scenery. In fact, most of the native 
standard is due to limited range, and judging by it, foreigners are 
likely to be grievously disappointed when they visit the show places 
of Japan. Matsushima and the Inland Sea are very beautiful, but 
they are types to be found everywhere in the world, and the 
exaggeration of the native causes a sense of disappointment that 
is likely to swing the balance over too far into an unjust sense 
of depreciation. 

It can well be asked then what is the immense attraction which 
undeniably lies in this eastern race — an attraction that makes 
them the goal of so many seekers after the novel and the curious ? 
Japan has been called the " Land of the Lotus," but I think that 
the curiosity that has been roused in the western world concerning 
the Japanese has little to do with Lotus-eaters. It is the Japanese 
people, who, in their lives and thoughts past and present, afford 
so much food for study, not to Lotus-eaters but to men who have 
found here a mine of wealth worth the devotion of a lifetime to 
get at its inward spirit; and who, in their attractive presentation 
of their discoveries, have led sO' many tourists to believe that what 
has taken the discoverer years of minute observation to strip from 
its coverings lies open and patent to the sight. The result is that 
the average casual traveller passing from point to point has. after 
all, to fall back on the contents of the curio-shops and bazaars, and 
the comfort of travel and climate as compared with the benighted 
condition of India or the limited range of China. In Japan at 
least one finds creature comforts, and can wander through the 



NUNC DIMITIS 327 

country without those special preparations which would imply an 
expedition of the old days to the heart of Africa. The attraction 
to others, however, is the Japanese people, and, as I have said 
before, the upper classes of to-day can here be altogether elimi- 
nated. Forty years agO' as an anachronism — a living picture of 
our own material past — perhaps they were the chief interest. To- 
day, they are simply the polished conventionalized men of the world, 
who differ very little east and west of the i8oth meridian. The 
common people, however, maintain much of their old interest in 
primitive traits. The grudging extension of political privileges 
to them has still limited their ideas to the immediate affairs of 
their daily life, a range which in every country changes very 
slowly and only under the pressure of great material progress. 
Great discoveries affecting daily life have an immense influence on 
the mass of the people, but human labour is so cheap in Japan 
that steam and electricity have had far less application as yet in 
the form of labour-saving machinery than would be supposed. In 
their daily occupations these uses made of natural forces have 
hardly influenced the common people, who' are still handicraftsmen, 
still artisans. But after all it is this unchangingness of thought 
that makes the common people of Japan interesting to-day and 
from which we can draw some very useful lessons. 

It is very difficult to picture just how our ancestors lived, 
and still more difficult to picture just how they thought. In fact, 
we are farther removed from them in the latter than in the former. 
The description of material things is a matter of words, and if 
these change in meaning the change is usually so gradual as to 
admit of detection. In this way we probably can figure fairly well 
the material environment of our ancestors, but when it comes to 
looking at that environment with his eyes language gives us less 
assistance. Words have done more than change their meaning. 
They have changed the spirit of that meaning, that subtle soul of 
a word that is so dependent on our political and social surround- 
ings. If we were planted down to-day in the home of our ancestor 
of a thousand years ago I am afraid we would have a very hard 



328 SAKURAMBO 

row to hoe. With our individuahsm, boldly expressed as it is in 
these modern days, we would soon most roughly ride counter to the 
old gentleman's ideas, and fairly before the novelty of our general 
" make-up " had a chance to appeal to him, the insult to his headship 
would make itself felt, and we would have a taste of the patria 
pofestas and the dungeon cell, while he decided in his mind whether 
it were better to choke us out of the world, or shove us off on 
some of his acquaintance by the simple medium of exchange and 
barter, to the profit of his purse and the perhaps entanglement of 
the purchaser. It is our individualism that has made the differ- 
ence to the western world. For that reason our formulae have 
been cast on much broader and simpler lines, to apply to a much 
wider range of subjects, and the minutiae must be left largely to the 
individual subject. If he cannot take care of himself, so much the 
worse for him. The State will only engage to look after him 
before the period known as the years of discretion. This has been 
steadily at work modifying our system for centuries. At times 
it has made great advances at a bound, as in 1789 and again in 
1848, but it has never been absent. This is very much the reverse 
of the Japanese, who up to 1870 was living under the same system, 
social and mental, as his forefathers. The decline of the imperial 
power, followed by the civil wars, had given rise to a military caste 
which soon became limited to its professional menibers. From 
that date the people ^ere restricted to their respective spheres, and 
a minute code was laid down as to their conduct. This code, as 
far as it showed any tendency to change, was towards making it 
still more stringent. 

Forty years could hardly make a very wide impression 
on it, especially in country districts removed from the life 
of the outer world. The existing relations of family life and 
of village life, between employer and employed, between the 
farmer and his peasant kind, can be carried back to former times 
or forward from former times. It will be sufficient to recall the 
relation of the servant in a family. Domestic servants are rated 
at wages of two yen (one dollar) a month. This, of course, means 



NUNC DIMITIS 329 

that the relation of the servant in the household is a very different 
one than with us. They are clothed and fed and educated and 
prepared for their future independent life much as if they were 
connected with the family. Clerks go into the establishment of 
their masters on the same severe terms. Their food is plain, their 
apprenticeship is long, and the wages nil, and they prefer it to the 
harsher and (to them) unpleasant service of a foreigner. Their 
relation to the master is personal, they learn the business, and 
when the service is completed they are started out in business by 
him and with an established connection, so to speak. So it goes 
through the many grades of life. And as the relations are the 
same so must the little tricks of method, even of physical habits, 
be the same, so unchanging is the code and so unchanging is the 
habit of thought it must have inculcated. There are no great 
material changes here to be worked into it and to disturb it. No 
discovery of steam or electric power to call into exercise new 
faculties of the brain. Everything moves on in the same even 
ruts, which take a smoother and smoother polish with the decades 
and tens of decades. This, it seems to me, is the interesting feature 
of " life Japanese." We are watching the man of the past at work. 
It can only be seen now in small ways, and great was the privilege 
of those who saw it in its original untouched condition. 

As to how far back we can carry this life into the past of other 
nations is a difficult question, but much of the life of the common 
people of India is singularly unchanging. Certainly with a knowl- 
edge of it we can read better the old description of dead and gone 
nations of the past. We translate too much our present ideas into 
gaudy descriptions of the great festivals of the Mesopotamian 
cities. Life in Babylon was probably not so different from life in 
India to-day, as far as the common people went. The glitter of 
gold and silken banners, the hosts of richly clad priests in pro- 
cession, the troupes of dancers, can be softened down to the. tones of 
to-day, where there is more brass than gold, the women far from 
the ravishing dream of the poets, and a good deal of hemp or the 
cotton plant is woven into the silk. The priests are still there, but 



330 SAKURAMBO 

their pounces have been dipped, their mysteries have been stripped 
from them; and there also more brass than gold has been found. 
Time throws much of a glamour over everything, and he has not 
hesitated to so adorn the physical proportions of our ancestors. 
The fierce warrior in armour seems a terrible spectacle, but it is 
simply his unfamiliarity to our eyes, his remoteness, as of some 
strange monster of Mesozoic times. Put a man of our present 
generation — one of our own acquaintance — into a suit of armour 
and he is far from terrible. In fact, he probably could not get into 
it, for the improvement of physical surroundings is said to have 
increased the proportions. of the race. Sir Launcelot might possi- 
bly be even classed as a " runt " in these days, so far distant is the 
seventh century. And it is to be suspected that these terrible heroes 
of Japanese times are not so unlike our mild-mannered neighbours 
surrounding us. Unfortunately for man, however, we cannot con- 
firm our suspicion that this applies also to more than physical 
stature. 

How hard we labour and strive to make a name for our- 
selves. We often see the pompous statement of a man that he 
" writ his name large across the page of history." One can well 
ask. In what way ? " Who cares to subsist like Hippocrates' 
patients, or Achilles' horses in Homer, under naked nominations, 
without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsam of our mem- 
ories, the entelechia and soul of our subsistences ? But the iniquity 
of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals w4th the memory 
of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but 
pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives, that burnt 
the temple of Diana; he is almost lost that built it. Time hath 
spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. 
In vain we can compute our felicities by the advantage of our good 
names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is likely to 
live as long as Agamemnon." Three thousand years and more 
before Christ, Babylon was a great city. Their life and thought 
is before us, not in many ways unlike our own. They bought and 
sold, worked and played, quarrelled, and even went to law. Their 



NUNC DIMITIS 331 

contracts and deeds of conveyance are before our eyes in the 
British Museum. Mr. A covenants and agrees to sell to Mr. 
B the lot of ground with messuage built thereon at the corner of 
Nebuchadnezzar Avenue and Bel Street for and by the considera- 
tion of so much weight of silver duly paid (and weighed) and 
delivered, etc., etc., with a description of the property and the 
signatures of the subscribing witnesses. The said Nebuchadnez- 
zar was, as we know, a very great king; the tale of his being 
turned out to grass was a malicious invention of a conquered and 
maltreated people who had no other means of blackening the char- 
acter of their oppressor. His health was of the greatest im- 
portance, and yet we do not know even the name of his physician, 
let alone the qualifications which gained him his eminent position. 
The cares and complexities of his great empire called for great 
legal learning in its administration, and yet the name is lost of the 
leader of the bar of that day. Of his cook, Nabuzardan, we know 
at least the name, if so great an authority on the kitchen as Friar 
John of the Funnels is to be relied on. 

If we ask what is the value of human fame, can we not go a 
step farther and ask what is the value of the fame of nations? 
These nations of the past are so dead and gone, so out of all real 
touch with the nations of modern times, that for any active sym- 
pathy they might have been located in Mars. The only connec- 
tion we have with them is in a faint reflex of customs dimmed by 
time but still comprehensible to us, or into which we read our own 
meaning with but little thought as to the meaning they read into 
them. We adopt onl)^ the formula ; the living interest of the past 
has died out of them. The man in Babylon five thousand years 
ago was born, lived, married, died, went through all the alternation 
of joy and despair that we go through to-day. He is flesh of our 
flesh and bone of our bone, and yet we have no real sympathy for 
him. Their woes are our woes and yet not our woes; they are 
only museum specimens, duly labelled, curious to the sight and 
understanding. So are the huge wmged monsters, half men, 
half lion or bull that this ancestor of ours evolved out of his con- 



332 SAKURAMBO 

sciousness of things. I think in some ways these nations have a 
great advantage over us. They at least, after enjoying their 
period on earth, have handed down their record to the future, and 
singularly complete are the remains they have left to us. They 
seemed instinctively to turn to the most durable material on which 
to grave their records — baked clay and the hard granite or diorite. 
Barring man's destructive hand, it will take long ages for Nature 
to wipe the page clean of the record the Babylonian and Assyrian 
and Egyptian have placed for future men to read. Parchment 
stands a small show in the contest of durability against brass and 
stone. The modern world has gone a double length. We have 
abandoned entirely oral tradition. We purposely throw as little 
strain on the memory as possible, leaving much to written notes 
taken at the time and kept handy for reference. We have ostenta- 
tiously left off training the memory to devote our whole time to 
developing the understanding. Now there is a distinct disadvan- 
tage in this, inasmuch as in the early years during which the 
memory gets its training, our present system and memory discipline 
can go hand in hand. There is every reason to teach the child 
early to think, but there is no necessity of doing so memorandum in 
hand. In the old days of our fathers, their misdeeds in school 
were penalized by the imposition of hundreds of lines of verse or 
prose to be learned by heart, and excellent discipline it was, as the 
ease and accuracy of quotation of which they were masters shows 
us in their public debates. There are many little incidents that 
at the time hardly seem worthy of note, and which later circum- 
stances make most interesting or valuable to succeeding genera- 
tions. Our memories are getting shorter and shorter, and if a 
man sixty years hence had to give even the general details to fill 
in some history of to-day, we should much less trust to his account 
than, under similar circumstances, to that of the man who ran 
through the whole gamut of classical literature with ease and 
accuracy. 

We are, however, not satisfied to stop at this point. In the 
rare cases in which we resort to stone to perpetuate our memories, 



NUNC DIMITIS 333 

what is sought? The softest and easiest to work. How long is a 
modern graveyard to last in any shape of intelligibility? The 
old slate tablets of our fathers are far the more durable, but the 
present day runs to marble and sandstone, and if they do take 
granite it must be softer qualities which take — and lose — a high 
polish easily and disintegrate rapidly. In the graveyards of to-day 
it is not the graves of a hundred years ago that have suffered. 
It is those of thirty and forty years ago, whose inscriptions are 
hardly legible. To stone or brass, however, we do not often resort. 
Our mainstay is paper, and on that we have built the whole struc- 
ture of our history as the world is to know us in the future. There 
is much in the world of the past that is useful to know, even if we 
make but little or no practical application of it. It at least teaches 
us the important fact hozv things came to pass. It is only the im- 
mediately useful that sur\nves by use. Doubtless the future gen- 
erations can get along quite as well without knowing anything more 
about us than they have taken from us as at first hand, and we 
are adopting admirable methods to see that they will not be troubled 
with details. As it is, we have the merest fragments of the world's 
literature and history. If it had not been for the material used, 
the existence of the ancient world would be as obscure to us to-day 
as that of the nations who built those mysterious ruins in Central 
America and in Central Africa. They would only exist as doubt- 
ful traditions to be set down as another mythlike Atlantis. In the 
twenty-five hundred years that have elapsed since Homer's time, 
the bulk of a great literature has literally disappeared. It has been 
fourteen hundred years since the fall of the Roman Empire, and 
we have gone far enough to know that of its literature more has 
been lost than preserved. It has been fifteen hundred years since 
the Romans left Britain. Of the first thousand years only frag- 
ments of its literature remain. It is but three hundred years since 
Shakespeare's time, during which Ben Jonson, Massinger, Web- 
ster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, and Dekker, have become the 
gradually diminishing property of a few literary men, only to 
interest the general public in the form of apt quotation ; and there 



334 SAKURAMBO 

is no guarantee that three hundred years more will not put Shakes- 
peare in the same position. To-day he is more quoted than read, 
and the reading and quotation is becoming more and more centred 
on a few plays. In other words, the whole life of the man is 
getting out of touch with us, and we are reading the fortunately 
wide range of his views into our own environment. 

Our insignificance as men, however, is accentuated, not so 
much by time as by thought and civilization ; the lack of symmetry 
and sympathy and connection. If we have no sympathy with the 
distant past, we have almost as little with peoples of the present 
removed from us in thought and habits. We show but a languid 
interest in the misfortunes of such peoples. We read of frightful 
slaughters in Armenia, of famine in India, of the disappearance 
of a whole population into the dust of its neighbouring volcano. 
It is a newspaper item to us. A man slips his dollar into the glass 
bowl exposed on the street for the use and benefit of the sufferers, 
and goes on his way with far less real thought about it than if 
the electric car had run over and mangled the pet house dog. It 
is not our fault. We cannot take interest too far from our imme^ 
diate surroundings. We take an interest in the slaughter that 
great armies wreak on each other, for that is something that may 
come to ourselves any day, and we cry out for some method of do- 
ing away with such njethods of settling disputes, but we have no fear 
of Turks or Cossacks or Kurds, falling on us from the skies and 
filling the streets and wells with the dead and dying. Take some 
of the sketches of that kaleidoscope of nations found in d'Amici's 
" Constantinople." Look at the worn, thoughtful faces of the old 
men there depicted. Those men are living their lives with as little 
thought of us as we of them. We do not know the kindly old 
face in front of us. Just as well we do not, for in thought there 
is probably no sympathy between us. We wish him well, and yet 
for all real meaning he might be as immaterial as the printed paper 
or as an inhabitant of another world. And so it has gone on not 
only for the present but in the past for untold generations. These 
men of ages back have existed, but to-day, individually, they have 



NUNC DIMITIS 335 

barely the reality of a dream. And as we look at the waste places 
of the earth which they made to bloom and flower we can well 
believe them a dream. Nature is far more powerful than we are, 
and drives us hither and thither over the face of the globe. In 
the face of her periods it really seems as if the question as to who 
shall carry out the scheme of evolution, white man or yellow man, 
was a very trifling one to her. We are newcomers, to play our 
part and disappear as others have done before us and elsewhere in 
the Cosmos. 

Perhaps then to us men the real problem is the race, and that 
it is alone the race that counts and to which we are to direct our 
efforts. The question is — how to control the individual and yet 
develop his powers. Rules and regulations have their own great 
defect. Man is complex, and the object is that his development 
should be harmonious. West answers the question by giving him as 
much freedom as possible and takes the risks of abnormalities. 
East fits the man to a preconceived mould and forcibly starves her 
abnormalities out of existence. In both cases are still applied the 
old natural rules inherited from the past, but the West recognizes 
the possibility of progress and fosters genius which necessarily 
is abnormal. The East takes the past as the fixed standard and 
allows nothing to flourish outside of it. But even in the West we 
are restrained. Man is a herd, and just as animals suppress the 
lame and the freak, so all wanderers from the human herd must 
pay for their idiosyncrasies. We want neither angels nor devils. 
Departures from the norm are met with hostility, and must make 
their way good in the face of such hostility, not against the inquir- 
ing spirit. It is the West only that to some extent the inquiring 
spirit has been able to make its voice heard, demanding that the 
innovation at least be given a hearing. More it cannot do. In 
the East up to very recent times it has been unknown. After all, 
a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the capacity of a people 
to live is far more to them than what nations may say of them when 
their civilization has gone to dust. People can judge of the 
capability of the past, the future is groping in the dark and new 



836 SAKURAMBO 

steps taken rashly may bring disaster. It is the hmitation of his 
experience, the tacit admittance of the Hmitation of his capabihties, 
that makes man conservative. Genius is rarely happy. Perhaps 
the more we carry this conservatism into our individualism the 
happier we are. I do not mean that subserviency to formula that 
is the prevalent tone of the East, but that wise balance due to wider 
horizon which is the heritage of our western world. Well can 
we bear in mind those wise words of Herr Teufelsdrockh, " So 
true is it, that the Fraction of Life can he increased in value not 
so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your De- 
nominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me. Unity itself 
divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a 
zero then; thou hadst the world under thy feet. Well did the 
Wisest of our time write: 'It is only with Renunciation (Ent- 
sag^n) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.' " 

It is the stirring events of the past — so much the all, the 
finality to the men of that day, and such Dead Sea fruit to us to- 
day — that makes us doubt the real importance of our human affairs 
to anything but ourselves. We have before our eyes the insect 
that seeks his mate, exhausts himself, and dies; and it is, too, 
probable that the importance of humanity is a fiction of our own 
brain. And, indeed, when we look on the different races of men, 
our capacities are sc exactly akin to the other manifestations of 
Nature that in very shame we hide our heads from such obvious 
facts, and for ages have cackled about the divinityship lodged in 
our skulls. Modern science has broken down some of this feeling. 
Comparative anatomy attaches more importance to locality and 
convolutions of different parts of our brain as compared with the 
other animals below us in the scale, and we are beginning to 
suspect that after all we may be only the as yet ripest product of 
some vast scheme, — not separate and apart from it, not a favoured 
child for whose enjoyment all the rest has been provided. It 
has been hard for us to abandon our theory of " the final product." 
Through all the pains and penalties of our lives, with all the suffer- 
ing of Nature going on under our eyes, we have still steadily pur- 



NUNC DIMITIS 337 

sued this ignis fatuiis — that the world is properly a scene for enjoy- 
ment, not for strife. If it were not pitiable it would be laughable 
to see how we grasp at the merest shadows to bolster up our 
despairing hopes. To us it is, or we pretend it is, all fact. Youth 
grasps the shadow of life as real, old age the shadow of death as 
real, but there is little difference between the two stages except 
in so far as Nature sends the blood bounding through the arteries 
in the case of the one and chills the blood of the other. Old age ! 
The very term is relative. The bodily frame of one man as 
measured by our terms of years may not have reached maturity, 
but in Nature's eyes he has long passed the threescore years and 
ten. And our period is not even marked on the second hand of 
Nature's timepiece. We know how little of its task science has 
done. We know as little about the real structure of a protoplasmic 
cell as we ever did; and there is a shrewd suspicion that in our 
attempted explanation of the mystery " life " we will merely suc- 
ceed in pushing the problem one stage farther back. The distance 
of the nearest star is inconceivable. The distance of the farthest 
is a mere row of figures without meaning. Our telescopes plunge 
into black depths of space between the southern constellations 
which so far represent nothing to us but a horrible chasm. Per- 
haps ages ago the light of some star has started through this space 
not to reach us until ages hence. Perhaps by the time such light 
does reach us the star itself will be the burnt-out cinder of such 
a world as that toward which we are ourselves tending. And if 
the infinitely great is beyond our grasp so completely we get as little 
consolation out of the infinitely little. Our limit of microscopic 
visibility is to-day about 1-7000 of a millimetre. By special 
devices we can photograph objects of i-ioooo of a millimetre, and 
by still further indirect devices we can, by means of the diffused 
light reflected by particles exposed to a strong beam of light detect 
their presence if at least i-iooooo of a millimetre in diameter. 
Speculatively we ha^^e pushed things still farther, and, by means of 
formulae deduced from the action of gases, can conceive of the 
diameter of an atom of hydrogen as placed at not less than 10^^ 



338 SAKURAMBO 

of a millimetre. Now the volume of Thompson's corpuscles are 
placed at but lo^^ part of an atom, or as Mr. Whetham has 
graphically stated comparable in size " to a fly roaming about inside 
a cathedral." What man does get therefore out of his study in 
these latter days of his physical surroundings is the sense of the 
vastness of this universe. A vastness that makes the explanation 
of it in the past seem so very trifling, makes the nature of the 
divinityship evolved by those ancient communities seem so very 
inadequate. 

When, however, we look on this great system of suns and 
worlds with its countless insoluble problems, let alone the insolu- 
bility of its central problem, is it any wonder that man, after having 
exhausted every rational means, should cut the Gordian knot and 
fall back on the old device of a dens ex machirm, in which he can at 
least exhaust all his powers of casuistry and dialectics on a new 
field of argimient, which logomachy will distract him from the 
real problem. If the scheme of the material world is beyond 
his grasp he can at least devise a substitute for it, and try and 
frame his facts to fit that substitute. But the difficulties that this 
leads us into are greater than those we have avoided, for our mental 
grasp is too limited to frame such scheme for this grand universe ; 
and many, bafiled and beaten, have given it up in despair. Many, 
however, have such spiritual hunger that the limitations of the 
human mind is a constant source of pain, a corroding acid eating 
into their very souls. Wandering in the mazes of their own per- 
plexities, unwilling to accept their limitations, " kicking against the 
pricks," such men are often driven in their attempt to measure the 
infinite by the finite, to abandon all effort to find man's true place 
in Nature, and they fall back on that shadowy authority of the 
past, which in our longing to communicate with it has such influence 
over us ; for after all it is the only tangible thing we have to grasp. 
If the past is shadowland, the future is doubly so. It is an unsatis- 
factory method but it is the only one to many men; for human 
reason is not such as to solve the problems presented to it. Well 
did Newman express this agonized cry of the puzzled human soul, 



NUNC DIMITIS 3S9 

when he, giving up the battle with his doubts, sought refuge in 
Authority. His beautiful hymn appeals to all engaged in this 
struggle or any struggle in which man is pitted against forces too 
vast for him and lies crushed under the sense of his insignificance. 
It expresses the almost dramatic hopelessness of our situation 
before these abysmal depths of Space and Time, 

" Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, 

Lead thou me on, 

The night is dark and I am far from home." 



Finis. 



r» 



SEP 29 1906 






M 




SAKURAMBO 



By 

JAMES S. DE BENNEVILLE 



"Oh, past delights. 
Whereof the very thought excites 
A thrill in every limb, as though 
The merry life of long ago 
I lived again." 

Romance of the Rose 



(All rights reserved) 



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